Organizing Your Kitchen Cabinets

I really enjoy coming home from the grocery store and unloading my purchases and organizing them into my crowded cabinets and refrigerator. I've come to the realization that most people just cram their food into the cabinet wherever they see an opening. My take on that is a bit different. The images in this post are actually from my kitchen.


A quick but important aside: my brother is here visiting from Minnesota and made quite a few comments on how I must not spend any time doing anything other than organizing my kitchen. I said, "I organized it once and now I just follow through by putting things where they belong. That way it will always stay organized." It's as easy as that!

My food cabinets have zones. I love organizing everything by zones. For food, I have zones like boxed goods, rice, pasta, canned goods, spices, baking products, hot chocolate and the "extras" zone where I store my backup products. The products I use most are in the easiest spots to reach, and I only place things on shelves where you can see the items from the floor. If I don't see it I won't know that it's there. The way you lay out your food cabinets will totally depend on the size and the geography of your kitchen.

Ideally I would like to have custom cabinets at some point in my life. I think that a custom pantry would be a dream come true. If I could create my own pantry it would have lots of drawers, sliding shelves and an area specifically designed for spices. If you are considering remodeling your kitchen I would encourage you to look into custom cabinets or at least specialty cabinets that allow you to specialize the design of your kitchen to the needs of your organizational challenges.

For those of you lucky ducks who have unlimited storage space in your kitchen, consider yourself blessed! You should be able to easily fit your countless small kitchen appliances and electronics just fine with some basic organization and a little bit of effort. For the rest of you... all you need to do is get creative and figure out how you can maximize your space. If necessary, get some type of rack to hang from the wall or ceiling to get your pots and pans out of the way. Some of the ceiling racks can double to store things on top of the actual shelf (think baking pans and sheet pans, etc.). Display your spices in a cute spice rack on the counter or stove; throw your flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking chips, etc. in a cute glass canister on the counter to make room in the cupboard; store your sheet pans and other baking pans inside or under the oven; or if your cereal boxes are too tall to fit in the cupboard transfer them to a Tupperware container that fits nicely on your shelf. There are tons of tricks about maximizing your space - just be creative. The best trick I have is to clean out your cupboards and throw away stuff you really don't use. You'll be amazed by the amount of space that opens up.





One of my absolute biggest pet peeves in the kitchen is reusable storage containers. I hate, hate, hate messy reusable containers that you have to dig through to find the lid that fits. Normally, I don't like to promote brands, but my favorite reusable storage container is the Gladware with interlocking lids. I love these because they stick together and are easy to find, and they also don't fall over and make an even bigger mess (and they're cheap!). I recently moved and when I did I threw out all of my other storage containers to start fresh. If you have like 1123 different types of storage containers I'm assuming this frustrates you. Consider starting over and only buying one brand. It probably won't break the bank. BUT - if you don't want to waste, definitely use your largest container as the home base and stack the containers according to size inside of the largest container, then arrange the lids on the side or under the base depending on their size.



My last tidbit on that is that if you have a lot of loose items in your cabinets (I'm talking like taco seasoning or yeast packets, a little thing of cake icing or a pack of candles) consider storing them in a little basket or even a reusable storage container (as opposed to throwing it away!). I have a small container that has my cake/cupcake decorating supplies, which works great because they're all contained in one bucket. I also like to use the reusable storage containers to store nuts, brown sugar, dried fruit and other foods that should be kept air tight

I live in a fairly small condo in downtown Seattle, so my space is limited. One of the few things that I like about how my kitchen was constructed is that the cabinets are very tall (but that means if I put something on the top shelf I have to climb on the counter to reach it!), but the flipside of that is that they are very narrow. They are only about 8" deep and the shelves are non-adjustable (really, who would install non-adjustable shelves in kitchen cabinets??). This makes it tricky. As much as I absolutely hate to do this, I store my super tall cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator. And, if I'm confessing that, I also store my full loaves of bread and full containers of bagels or English muffins up there because I don't have a bread basket that's big enough to hold them on the counter. So, you caught me, not everything in my kitchen is perfect! But I do my best to work within my limitations.

My two takeaway points: be creative and follow through about keeping up your organized kitchen!