Beautiful Home Organizing Challenge: How To Organize Your Kitchen
The next space up on our Beautiful Home Organizing Challenge is the kitchen! While we actually don’t have a ton of closed storage and traditional kitchen cabinets in our kitchen, we still have plenty of unique storage options that needed organizing! I’ll also take this week as an opportunity to show you all around our kitchen and how we make due with limited closed storage and make the most of open storage ideas.
Below I’ve broken down the kitchen into a few different areas and linked everything I used to get organized!
xoxo
Emily
While we actually don’t have many kitchen cabinets in our kitchen, I think most of the ideas I share can be translated to either open or closed storage! We have a few lower cabinets along our back wall. Two are for very specific uses and didn’t need a whole lot of organizing as they’re made to hold specific things. If you’re renovating, this is definitely something to consider that will help you stay organized! We have a pull out spice rack cabinet and a tall skinny cabinet for baking sheets/pans.
To start with cabinets, I recommend emptying them all completely, vacuuming out, and wiping down the insides with a basic all-purpose cleaner and magic eraser if needed. You can also add contact paper or wallpaper to the bottom of your cabinets if you feel they need it (I did this in our under the sink cabinet). As with all organization I’ve been sharing, purging is key! We had a ton of items under here we needed to toss out or donate.
In our under-the-sink cabinet we keep most of our cleaning supplies, dish-washing supplies, and trashbags. I wash able to set this up to accomodate everything easily with a lot of extra room. I’ll link I’ll the items I used below!
Our kitchen island has several drawers on each side and a big open space in the middle. I need to utilize every inch of this space as it’s prime real estate in the kitchen. For the open space in the middle, we had the idea to hang pot racks underneath to neatly store all our pots, pans, and skillets! This works so much better than our previous storage of just stacking them all under here.
I also purged and reorganized all the drawers completely. I followed the same steps as the cabinet cleaning- emptying, vacuuming, wiping out, and putting down wallpaper inside where needed. Again purging is key here as we had so many things we never use taking up space, especially in the “junk” drawer.
For organizing drawers, bamboo divided boxes, silverware caddies, and drawer dividers all work great! I’m linking everything I used for this area below:
What makes our kitchen most unique is the large amount of open shelving options we have. It’s something I have always loved in a kitchen and still do. I enjoy displaying my items and styling all the shelves, so I’ve always been drawn toward open shelving! We have a few different styles in here from wall mount shelves, to rolling carts, and vintage furniture pieces- all function differently but every inch is used for storage!
I’ll share a few tips for successfully utilizing open shelving in your kitchen below:
-keep like items together and line them up neatly
-give your most used items the prime real estate so they are easy to grab
-utilize canisters and glass jars for spices, baking supplies, and foods.
-use baskets or crates to hide less attractive items on shelves (plastic cups, water bottles, etc.)
-mix in some decorative items here or there to add personality and variation
-a bread box is a great item for food to keep it stored away and out of sight, as well as fresh!
-when shopping for things like glassware, plates, baking dishes- choose items that are very neutral or go with your decor!
-add height by stacking on top of items- shallow baskets, cutting boards, cake plates/tiers, cookbooks, etc.
Sources: baking rack is vintage as well as long rustic table underneath open shelving. All open shelving is reclaimed wood with plumbing pipe fixture brackets. Most all glassware/canisters/decor is vintage as well.
Follow along for future posts in my Beautiful Home Organizing Challenge! We will be tackling all of the biggest organizational problem areas for a beautiful, functional home over the next several months! Our next space up is kitchen cabinets!
