How to Organise Your Kitchen: 7 Ideas for a Clutter-Free Space
You are here to get ideas to organise your kitchen - you are in the right place! Organising the kitchen is a big project to undertake. It is one of the most used areas in most houses and some would say it is the heart of any home.
With a deliberate approach you can have an organised kitchen most of the time.
Is it easy? Not in the beginning but once you crack the code it is an amazing skill for life. When we want to get our kitchen organised we need to look at this strategically and break it down.
At this stage, I can show you lots of products and pretty images of kitchens. Although this could give you ideas to organise your kitchen. This does not teach you the skillset you need or long-term behavioural change to have an organised kitchen.
In this article, I give 7 ideas to organise your kitchen but it is more than that you will learn the skill how to declutter and organise your kitchen for now and in the future.
When you have decluttered, cleaned and are organised by all means look at the pretty pictures on the many beautiful home sites. For now, let’s focus on how to organise your kitchen from a pragmatic perspective with a skill-based approach.
These are the 7 ideas to organise your kitchen in a nutshell:
Declutter the kitchen
Throw away rubbish
Remove items that do not belong in the kitchen
Clean dirty dishes
Put clean dishes away
Organise - Have homes for every item
Maintain your kitchen through morning, afternoon and evening routines
First, we need to declutter our kitchen, clean it a bit, and only then are we ready to organise our kitchen. We need “homes” and “flow” for every item we have in the kitchen. And finally, no organising project is useful long term without habits to sustain it over the long term. Please join me as we look at all the above in detail and how these ideas to organise your kitchen can help you.
1. Declutter the kitchen
When you start decluttering a large area or when you start a big declutter project, like the kitchen. You want to have some quick wins. This means that you want to have the maximum result for the least amount of effort.
It makes sense to want to have; clean, decluttered and organised cupboards or an organised pantry. You however only see this, when you open the door. Therefore the first thing I recommend you do when you declutter the kitchen is working on the kitchen counter only.
This is the order I suggest:
bin the rubbish
remove items
put things away if they don’t belong in the kitchen
clean the final dishes
2. Throw away rubbish
Let's start with an easy one, when you declutter the kitchen it gives quick results for your efforts. If you have one bottle, one wrapper, a piece of cardboard, and an empty milk bottle on your benchtop, things will look messy. You have to make it a habit to bin kitchen rubbish immediately and clear the bench at very regular intervals.
Before you continue to declutter the kitchen you want to empty the bins as well, both recycling, the green bin, and the normal bin. This gives you a clean slate to work with. Moving forward you want to think about when and how often you will empty the bins, for us in a household of four, it is once a day after dinner.
3. Remove items that do not belong in the kitchen
In most households, items find their way into the kitchen that really shouldn’t live there. If you have children or your kitchen is close to the entrance of your house this effect might be multiplied. Flylady has termed these messy areas; hotspots. Hotspots mean that random items gathered from being out are drawn to certain places. These places are often flat surfaces like tables, kitchen benches, and areas close to the entry. Items will almost magnetically go there even though it is clearly not the place they belong. If you have paper, toys, keys etc. in your kitchen get them out of this space but do not get distracted by other areas. Simply, place the items roughly where they will “live” and go straight back to the kitchen.
Your project is the kitchen - the other areas we will visit in due course.
4. Clean dirty dishes
By now there should be very little on your kitchen counter. What is left? Possibly items that live in the fridge, spices etc. put these in their respective spots. Ideally, you should only have dirty dishes left. Put some hot soapy water in the sink and make it official with dishwash gloves. This makes the process and your progress much more serious. You are saying to the world, look I am cleaning up, things are changing!
If you have a dishwasher, combine the dishwasher with handwashing some items. Continue until everything is clean. Dry all dishes straight away and put these items away as well.
5. Put clean dishes away
If there are clean dishes on the benchtop, put these away now. This is the same idea as the suggestion above, place things in their approximate “home”.
Do not worry about your cupboards yet. We declutter the kitchen by first making the benches clear. If this means you will put a clean plate in a messy (but clean) cupboard, so be it. We want to finish off one thing; the benchtop before we continue to declutter the kitchen and go onto the cupboards.
6. Organise - Have homes for every item in your kitchen
The key to finding homes for items is to move items to different areas in the kitchen. But before you do this, think about the most appropriate locations, where do you use: the cutting board, the knives, the cuttlery and crockery. In organising speak we call the final location of items their “home”.
7. Final idea to organise your kitchen maintenaince to keep your kitchen organised
First thing in the morning - put things away
Let’s start with painting a picture. You wake up and scramble to the kitchen, it is clean. Some items are drying and your washing machine is just finished. You put everything away, everything has a spot. When all is put away you grab the items you need to make lunches.
It is easy, your items flow from the fridge to the food prep area to the dishes.
Before you know it healthy lunches are packed, you might make yourself a cuppa.
Breakfast
The kitchen is now free for the breakfast onslaught.
Everyone knows where items live, and where they go after use and everyone can seamlessly make their own breakfast. After breakfast everyone grabs their lunches, the kitchen is clean again, and there might be a next load of dishes ready to be washed on a timer.
The afternoon cycle and tidy up
In the afternoon you put your items away, kids wash their lunch boxes, maybe you do some early food prep and get alot of the dishes that go with that cleaned now.
The evening tidy up
This is the hardest one for me because my energy is at its lowest and I simply don’t care anymore. Where possible get your family members involved and share the load equally those that cooked don’t have the clean up of those that had a fee pass in the morning and afternoon now pull their weight.
Bonus 8th idea to organise your kitchen
We finished some amazing work during, these steps to organise your kitchen. This is a good time to take a break, have a cup of tea/coffee and enjoy the results of your efforts.
Stay inspired with ideas to organise your kitchen and more!
Get the book Organsing Room by Room and go on a visual organsing journey through your house.
