Organize Your Kitchen Cabinets With These Amazing Tips

Organizing kitchen cabinets and drawers can be a daunting task. However, when you break it down to a few simple steps, you can easily organize your kitchen cabinets

There is so much kitchen stuff that one uses every day to prepare meals. Not to mention all the baking equipment needed if you love to bake like I do. Then add in the the fact all the kitchen utensils and gadgets and small appliances one needs (wants).

Therein lies the problem of organizing. What to do with all the kitchen equipment.

I have lots of kitchen stuff. Even though I promised myself when we remodeled our kitchen four years ago, I wouldn’t buy more  gadgets and such. Well, that promise  was short lived. My cooking abilities improved and so did my desire for better quality utensils, pans and  gadgets.

Unfortunately, when we moved into our newly remodeled kitchen,  I didn’t really organize it well. The everyday dishes were together and the glassware were together. Each in their respective cabinets. That is pretty much where it ended. Now fast forward to the present and nothing has changed except for all the newly acquired kitchen equipment. Those items truly had no home.

When I began to prepare a meal, I was looking high and low for the necessary tools because my family who unloaded the dishwasher didn’t know the proper place to store all the various items. Not only did this make meal preparation longer but it became frustrating as well.

We have an awkward corner cabinet that I lovingly refer to as the black hole.

As I looked into what I call our black hole cabinet,(actually, a deep corner cabinet) noticing that nothing really belonged together. It was a hodge podge of stuff. The family’s motto was if you don’t know where it goes, throw it in the corner cabinet hence the black hole.

It was time to organize these kitchen cabinets properly. After all, that was why we remodeled in the first place, to get more cabinet storage.

The First Step To Organize Your Cabinets

In order to be effective, you need to start with a plan. This will save time in the long run.

• Plan Your Kitchen Areas
  • Grab a pen and some paper to begin outlining how you want your organized kitchen to be. We’re going old school on this step. Write down everything you want your kitchen to be.

Use Work Zones

Do you want to use work zones? For example, baking zone, prep zone, cleaning zone.

A work zone simply means keeping all items needed for a kitchen task in one area. For a prep zone, all knives, cutting boards, vegetable peelers etc would be in the same area. This makes the task easier by keeping all like items within reach of the person prepping the meal.

• Assign work zones
  • Prep Zone
  • Cooking Zone
  • Baking Zone
  • Cleaning Zone

These are what are important to my meal prep. Yours maybe different according to your family needs and lifestyle.

Simplify Your Kitchen

Or perhaps you are more concerned with strictly organizing your kitchen so it flows well. It may be a small kitchen that simply needs every item to have a designated home. A place where all family members know where to look for that particular item.

One of the phrases I hear most in my kitchen is “I don’t know where this goes.” Sigh. That needs to stop. I have been tempted to get out my label maker and label every shelf and drawer. As a matter of fact, I do suggest that later on.

Looking into your cabinets and drawers, they may not all need some organizational help. Like my beverage glasses and mug cabinet. They were fine. All neatly standing in their own cabinet.

Where To Put Things In Your Kitchen Cabinets

You may want to make a blueprint of your kitchen and decide what cabinets should hold what. A little planning now will make less work later. Go ahead and write down your plans for each part of your kitchen.

Empty Each Cabinet And Drawer Of All Its Contents

The first step in any organizing project is to empty said area. In this case, each kitchen cabinet and drawer. Now you may want to empty one cabinet or drawer at a time. This is fine if you don’t have a lot of stuff. If you have many drawers with a ton of stuff in each one, it may be better to empty more than one before moving on to the next step.

Put All Like Items Together

This is very useful. Once your cabinets and drawers are empty begin grouping like items together. For example, all measuring spoons and cups. If you’re like me, I had my measuring cups in many different drawers. So, grouping them helped me with the next step.

Eliminate All Duplicate Items Or Ones You Don’t Use

It’s time to purge all unnecessary items.

Once you have all your kitchen tools grouped, you just might be surprised. For instance, I had 6 sets of dry measuring cups. How many sets of dry measuring cups does one need? In all honesty, I only got rid of one really old Tupperware set. Baking is my passion, so I just couldn’t let anymore go. But this did help me to know I needed to make room for all those measuring cups in the baking zone.

Did you pull out dishes that haven’t seen the light of day in years? Then it probably time for some tough love.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Is this item that important to be taking up valuable cabinet space?

Is this a seasonal item?

Perhaps you can start a large plastic bin and store all seasonal things in a different area of your home.

Decide What Organizing Items You Need

It’s time to go shopping. Either in your home or in a store.

Measure each cabinet and drawer. The interior, the door width and the height of the cabinet. Measure the drawers by inside interior, length and height of drawer. Then decide what organizing containers would be useful to keep items visible. Using your measurements scan the internet for bins that will fit your space.

• Select clear utensil trays.
  • Clear trays open up a small space. I purchased mine from Target.  They have a non skid interior so when you shut a drawer nothing slides around.
• For storing baking sheets or cutting boards, use a stand with multiple slots.
  • This way you can stand cookie sheets on their side. Storing them this way makes them easier to get to.  Just make sure the cabinet has enough height to accommodate this type of organizer.
• To maximize a deep kitchen corner cabinet use a large lazy Susan.
  • This helps prevent items from getting lost inside. It is much easier to store often used items on a lazy susan. By simply turning, this allows easy access without reaching far back into the cabinet. I use mine to store all my Instant Pot accessories but often used spices and oils are another option.
• Using stacking wire shelves
  • This will let you use all that valuable vertical space. By increasing visibility and accessibility in your cabinets, this will help them stay organized.
• Don’t stack different types of items on top of each other.
  • Make sure each item(s) has it own place. If necessary, get your label maker and label those cabinet shelves and bins. This will help family members to know where items belong.
• Avoid placing large items in front of smaller things.
  • You want to keep everything as accessible as possible. If you can’t see it, you won’t use it. Place the taller item in the back so nothing is blocking the view. Make sure you can easily reach it. If you have to move things around to reach them this will create more of a mess.
• Adjust your shelves in your cabinets.
  • If possible, adjust the shelves in your cabinets to use every bit of vertical space. Adjust the space to fit of your needs.

How To Organize Your Kitchen Cabinets And Drawers

The first step is to clean all the cabinets and drawers.

Before loading your tools and dishes back into their respective areas, vacuum out all of the crumbs. Then with a damp cloth wipe the drawers and shelves down. This will get rid of all the dust and gunk that has built up.

If desired, line the drawers and cabinet shelves with some pretty shelf paper.

Reload Your Kitchen Cabinets And Drawers

Now for the fun part.

Place all your organizing bins and shelves into place. Then put all your kitchen equipment into them.

How To Arrange Dishes In Cabinets

Dinner plates, salad plates and bowls are stacked differently in a kitchen cabinet.

• Dinner Plates
  • I stack dinner plates without any need for additional organizers. They simply rest on the floor of the cabinet. I don’t stack anything on top of them to make them easier to get to.

• Salad Plates
  • Salad plates are stacked vertically in an organizer that holds them upright. This helps to use more vertical space and I can keep more dishes in a smaller amount of space.

• Cereal bowls
  • Cereal bowls are stacked together on the floor of the kitchen cabinet. I stack them about 4 bowls high. You could also use a shelf organizer above the dinner plates and store the cereal bowls on top.

Evaluate And Decide

At this point, you may find you need additional storage bins and such. Or maybe you just need to try different ways to arrange the bins. You could also just lay utensils inside the drawer without a bin.  I find by using bins, utensils and such stay put.

Plus when an item is removed, the open space is obvious, stating where an item needs to be returned to. This is especially helpful for family members when putting away clean dishes.

But again you might want to go ahead and label the spaces. Labeling can make all the difference in maintaining an organized kitchen.

You might see a void of essential kitchen tools.  They might simply be worn out. Efficiency is priceless in any kitchen. Check out this guide for my list of the best kitchen utensils to replenish your kitchen.

In Summary

Finally, you have completed and organized your kitchen cabinets and drawers in just a few steps. feels great doesn’t it?

Let’s recap the steps:

1. Plan kitchen areas.
2. Empty all cabinets and drawers.
3. Put all like items together.
4. Purge any duplicate or unnecessary items.
5. Decide how you want to organize each cabinet and drawer (time to go shopping).
6.  Clean cabinets and drawers. Vacuum and wipe out.
7. Put all your stuff away in your clean and organized cabinets and drawers.

Now that you have organized kitchen cabinets and drawers, it’s time to tackle that cluttered kitchen counter!