Organizing Your Kitchen

Do you live in a small space?  Looking for ways to maximize your kitchen space? Well here are some tips that I found helpful.  

I have been meaning to organize my kitchen and the kitchen cabinets, but I have not been able to because I have been so busy lately.  But finally, I found the time to get a move on it and I was able to organize a few of my cabinets.  I found ways to organize my kitchen making it easier to access items, more efficient, and easy on the eyes =)

The Pantry: In my pantry I had canned foods, boxed cake mixes, bottles (salad dressings, marinades), etc...

• What I did was purchased File Holders from the Container Store and place the bottles in them to make them easier to move around and to save on space.

• For the canned foods I purchased a can rack from The Container Store and this definitely saved a lot of room in my pantry.

The Cabinets:  I had a lot of boxes for crackers, pastas, snacks, etc...

• I bought shelf helpers to add an extra set of shelving.
• I used this for my snack cabinet as well as the cabinet I use to for dishes.
• I purchased baskets with handles (large and small) at Walmart.  These baskets were ideal for keeping portioned snacks, pasta boxes, noodle bags (that are difficult to stack).
• I started to pre-portion out some of our snacks (in snack bags) making it easy grab things on the go and get rid of the bulky packaging.
• I also did this for my refrigerated snacks (i.e. baby carrots, celery, fruit).






















• For the spice and bottle cabinet I purchased a couple of Lazy susans’ to make it easy to access all items in the cabinets and maximize the room in the cabinets.
• Tray dividers are a good way to store baking sheets and serving trays.

Baking Goods: Bags of flour, sugar, chocolate chips were a mess in my cabinets.

• I purchased different sizes of Mason Jars, labeled them and filled them up.  Usually a lot of the baking ingredients come in bags which makes it hard to stack.  I found that Mason jars kept the ingredients fresh (because the Mason Jar has an air tight seal) and this made it so much easier to see which ingredients I was looking for.  
• The labels that I used were erasable food labels (a necessity =))
• You can also use the baskets with handles to place the bags in if you prefer.

BEFORE

AFTER

Tea:  My boyfriend and I drink quite a bit of tea and all those loose boxes are space hogs.

• I purchased a Tea Holder, one for decaffeinated and one for caffeinated tea.
• I cut each box to fit in each slot, so we can refer back to the packaging in case we wanted to repurchase the tea again.

BEFORE

AFTER

Tips:

1. Edit.  Remove items that are expired and donate things that you will probably never use.
2. Organize to fit your lifestyle.
3. Think outside of the box.  Think of ways to use everyday items as other things (i.e. Jars as storage containers).
4. It’s sad to say, but It is not cheap to organize.  Take an inventory of what you have and what you need to fit your organizing needs.  
5. Some stores that have organizing tools:
1. Walmart
2. Target
3. Kmart
4. Bed Bath and Beyond
5. The Container Store
6. Hardware Stores






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