Do you waste time locating or retrieving your kitchen utensils while cooking? Do you end up eating out more often than you’d like, and as a result eating bigger portions of food loaded with higher fat and sugar, because cooking at home has become an unpleasant chore? Does it create unnecessary stress in your life? Don’t let your kitchen organisation (or lack of it) be in the way of better health.
Follow these 7 fundamental rules for an organised kitchen:
1. Keep only what you use.
A study conducted by Professional Organiser Barbara Hemphill revealed that 80% of what we keep we never use. Imagine the waste of time to locate and retrieve the item you need when it’s lost amongst plenty of others you don’t use. So go ahead and purge your cabinets of what you don’t need, use, or love. Be ruthless with plastic containers, plastic shopping bags, appliances you haven’t used in years, spices you can no longer smell, etc.
2. Be mindful of items that serve only one purpose and that you seldom use.
There’s a lot you can do with a chopping board and knife! And instead of keeping your fine china for special occasions, why don’t you enjoy it every day and let go of your ordinary set?
3. Assign a dedicated home to every item so that you can remember where they are.
Place the item as close as possible to where it’s being used and make the ones you most frequently use easily reachable. If you want your children to be able to help themselves with a snack, place the items they would need on the lower shelves so that they can easily access them.
4. Keep similar items together in containers, baskets, or boxes.
Not only does it help locate an item more easily, but it can also help set a limit on how much to keep in a category and make cleaning easier and faster.
5. Save your countertops for items you use weekly for your kitchen duties.
Countertops are a prime space in the kitchen and should be used for preparing meals, not for storing items that are hardly used. If you need to keep them, find them a place in your cabinets.
6. Think vertical.
Use containers or magazine holders to keep baking pans, trays, lids, or wrapping papers upright to save space and make retrieval easier. Increase your cupboard space capacity by using multi-tier step shelves or door-mounted spice racks.
7. Put items away right after you use them.
It might add a couple of minutes to what you are doing but it’ll save you a lot of time later. If you can’t find what you want while cooking, you might give up cooking or settle for something less healthy than you had planned!
The kitchen is a very important hub in our homes. If you need help to set up your kitchen in an organised and efficient way, come up with meal plans, or are just after some ideas, reach out. There are various ways we could be working together.
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