Ideas to organise your kitchen

Ideas to organise and declutter your 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 make sense to want have; clean, decluttered and organised cupboards or an organised pantry.

  • You however only see this, when you open the door. Therefore the first things I recommend you do when you declutter the kitchen is working on the kitchen counter only.

The first step to take is declutter the kitchen

  • Let’s start with an easy one, when you declutter the kitchen and 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 bench top, 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 when and how often you will empty the bins, for us in a household of four, it is once a day after dinner.

  • 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.

    The key is you move items to different areas in the house to bring items to more appropriate locations. In organising speak we call the final location of items their “home”. If you have paper, toys, keys etc. do not get distracted by other areas. 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.

  • If there are clean dishes on the bench-top, 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 bench-top before we continue to declutter the kitchen and go onto the cupboards.

  • 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 on their respective spots. Ideally, you should only have dirty dishes left. Put some hot soapy water in the sink and make it official with dish wash 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 hand-washing some items. Continue until everything is clean. Dry all dishes straight away and put these items away as well.

    We finished some amazing work during, the first steps to declutter you kitchen. This is a good time to take a break, have a cup of tea/coffee and enjoy the results of your efforts.

Organise your kitchen during the day

  • 1. Waking up

    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.

  • 2. Breakfast

    The kitchen is now free for the breakfast onslaught. Everyone knows where items live, where they go after use and everyone can seamlessly make their own breakfast.

    After breakfast everyone grabs their lunches, the kitchen is clean again, their might be a next load of dishes ready to be washed on a timer.

  • 3. The afternoon cycle

    In the afternoon you put your items away, kids wash their lunch boxes and so the cycle of kitchen activities continue through to dinner until the next day.

  • 4. In the evening

    After dinner clean up as much as you can. Put that dishwasher on get the kids involved and let the people who have more energy in the evening take on most of the heavy load.

    This is also a great opportunity to practice the concept of rewards for example; if we all clean up the kitchen we can watch a movie next.