Tips For Organizing Your Kitchen Cabinets

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How To Organize and Clean Your Kitchen Cabinets

What would a kitchen be without kitchen cabinets?

Believe it or not, early day kitchen areas were not equipped with anything remotely like the beautiful kitchen cabinets of today – so much a part of beautiful home decor. In lieu of kitchen cabinets, homes of yesteryear usually had pantries where canned goods and supplies were stored. They might also have had wooden tables instead of counters, free-standing cupboards, china cabinets, or open shelves on the walls for dishes, storage drawers and bins for cooking utensils and storing of flour, sugar and the like.

As kitchen cabinets evolved from open shelving, they were usually crafted from non-descript wooden boards or plywood and then painted. One advantage was that you could change your kitchen decor easily – with just a fresh coat of paint in a different color!

While today’s kitchen cabinets are often made of fine-grained beautiful wood with self-closing doors and easy-glide drawer tracks, they can still be messy and a real pain to keep organized.

Organizing Kitchen Cabinets:

Kitchen cabinets may be custom designed to store dishes, drinking glasses, cups, bowls, all types of plastic house wares, cooking and baking utensils, silverware, cookbooks, cereal boxes, and canned goods.

When you get ready to organize your kitchen cabinets, prepare a drawing of your kitchen layout. Then make a list of the items you customarily use in the kitchen and the types of grocery items you store there.

Consider what section of the kitchen counter will be your food preparation area. This will be convenient to the refrigerator, storage of mixing bowls with knives and kitchen utensils within easy reach.

Store your drink ware, cups and glasses, serving plates and dishes in the over-counter cupboards near the sink. Generally, drinking glasses are closest to the sink, then cups, plates and other serving dishes. Plastic storage bowls, large glass bowls, pie plates, and other baking dishes are often stored in the kitchen cabinet under the food preparation counter.

Another counter can be devoted to your toaster, blender, or canister set, etc. On the shelves in the kitchen cupboard above that area, store baking ingredients and spices. Pots and pans, electric skillets, and other cooking utensils may be stored conveniently under this kitchen counter in close proximity to the stove.

Organizing Your Pantry:

If you are lucky enough to have a pantry, that takes care of storage of canned goods including pickles, jams, jellies, condiments, dry cereals, sugar, flour, etc. It’s easy to organize a pantry as you just put like items together.

However, if your pantry is actually built in to your kitchen cabinet system, it might be a little more difficult because the items are harder to see and harder to reach if they are on the top shelf. It is possible, though, to keep this cabinet completely organized if you only put things back where you got them or, if restocking, keep similar food products together.

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Organizing Your Kitchen Drawers:

Kitchen drawers are for storing:

1. Table/silver ware (use dividers to keep forks, spoons & knives separate),
2. Kitchen utensils used in cooking and food preparation,
3. A small tool drawer (scissors, screw driver, small tack hammer, etc.)
4. Clean dish towels
5. Small lids for pots and pans
6. Electric cords for appliances

The Kitchen Sink:

The space under the kitchen sink is usually pretty tight quarters as it also accommodates drain pipes, water pipes and maybe even the drain hose from your automatic dishwasher. Because of the heat and moisture generated from the hot water pipe and the dishwasher exhaust hose, it can be kind of a dank, smelly area. However, it is perfect for storing cleaning supplies, liquid dish detergent, dish washer soaps, etc. Use a square plastic container to keep the loose cans and bottles contained. Pull the container out for easy access to the supplies. Keeping these products in the plastic container also avoids messy spills that might run all over the bottom of the counter.