Organizing Kitchen Cupboards
June 7th, 2008
I had so much fun Friday morning. I came home from walking and decided to organize my little pantry. What an eye opener this was. It was already organized, but with a little tweaking it is even better. I know in a few months it will need tweaking again. That is a good thing as it reminds me what I have. As a professional organizer I am always organizing kitchens for other women and it was fun to follow my own advise as I took everything out and then put it all back together–only better.
One thing I did that I haven’t done before with this cupboard was to make a list of everything that is on each shelf. The contents at the back of the lower shelves can’t be seen when I’m not down on the floor looking for something. I found cereal and pie filling I didn’t know I had. Now my list is taped inside the cupboard at eye level and I will know what I have. As I use things I will cross them off. I’ll let you know how that theory works. (It is a good theory).
I then moved on to my other cupboards, fridge and lastly I cleaned my stove top. I didn’t have a lot of things out of place or that I had to get rid of but by putting some things in different places and using containers for a few things I made the whole kitchen look better and I feel so good about it. I want to just go and open cupboards and look at how nice they look. (Isn’t that silly?)
One thing I did find that didn’t belong was a quart size bottle that vitamins had come in and my daughter had saved for over three years. I took the label off and gave it to her so she can buy those vitamins if she ever wants them again. She agreed this was a better solution; the bottle did not need to live on a shelf.
What surprises have you found when organizing your cupboards?
June 8th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Oh, I don’t know if I should or shouldn’t share this one, but well, ok…
In our last house, our kitchen space was very ‘compact’ so our pantry was spread over a few cupboards, things we used all the time in one big long one, and the things that where not used all the time in another - so when we were packing to move house, we decided to go through and “purge” what we could from the not everyday pantry - to my surprise/horror/disgust/delight we found buried in the back the top of our wedding cake, it was 12 years old and needed to be tossed, but at least we found it!!
In this house now, we have a very, very tall pantry and the lower shelves I find difficult to access, so used to get the kids to get me stuff, but I went to our local $2 store and stocked up on some baskets and now they’re great, I can just pull the basket and get what I need, and then pop it back - each basket has it’s own “group” for instance, all our gravy sachet’s go in one, and our instant soup sachet’s in another.. works wonderfully and is so easy to find instead of stuff getting buried (maybe I should of put my cake top into a basket?).
June 10th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Over the long memorial week-end, I decided it was time to go through my spices. I have them labeled in clear bottles. Nice. However, there were so many spices I haven’t used in years. I empty the containers. Talk about space again. I was so happy about it….I giggled to myself. Don’t keep spices for more than 3 years so I have been told. They loose a lot of flavor. It is so much more managable. So very nice to look at now.