Cleaning out the Kitchen

Have you ever reached a point with a room or space in your house where you simply couldn’t go another minute being cluttered and un-functional?? I reached that point with my kitchen and over the course of a week reorganized and cleaned out each and every drawer and cupboard!!! We moved into this house 3 years ago (sheesh, time flies!!) and a lot of the cupboards had things in them that didn’t belong in the kitchen at all. I also had not one but TWO junk drawers!

This upper corner cupboard was SO hard to get mixing bowls and glass casserole dishes in and out of! It was driving me bonkers. So I took out half of them and moved them to the lower corner cupboard where we stored extra cereal.

which has been wonderful!! Next the cereal needed a new home, so I cleaned out this mish-mash cupboard and put it here along with some other food storage items that don’t fit in the tiny pantry cupboard.

Some of the mish-mash cupboard items didn’t belong in the kitchen at all so they went out…and the rest went into the Tupperware cupboard. This cupboard also had a bunch of jars and recyclable items that I use for crafts, so I cleaned those out to make room and put them upstairs in my craft closet.

So my TWO junk drawers were kind of ridiculous…so I made it into just one, and not so much a junk drawer as the drawer for pens, paper, batteries, scissors and a *few* misc items we use. That freed up an entire drawer! I moved Luke’s bibs & washclothes and all the aprons into the free drawer…

Which freed up this drawer…in which I moved all the hot pads into…

(all hand-crocheted by my mom, by the way)

in order to free up yet ANOTHER drawer. In this drawer I put in spatulas and spoons, tongs, etc that we use for cooking on the stove.

I didn’t take a before, but all the utensils above were in the same drawer as this one below, which as you can imagine was a chaotic mess!! Too much stuff for one drawer! it’s SO much better now.

Here’s two more cupboards that got some re-organizing---under the sink, and the one next to it which was a mish-mash mess again.

And now the really fun stuff! The pantry cupboard & closet:

The blue and green baskets/shelves I got at the dollar store. They help a TON to keep mixes and chocolate chips and other small baking items organized and kept neat. Down on the 3rd shelve I have since gotten more red-lid containers for sugars and got rid of the bulky cracker jars. All that’s left to do is make some cute labels!

The Pantry is a place that easily becomes a mess after shopping trips if things don’t have a home.

added an extendable shelf to the top shelf for additional storage. More green mini-shelves for Luke’s snacks mostly. The big bin is for crackers and chip bags!

I got rid of a lot of the bulky jars I had pasta in. As pretty as they are, they are bulky and not too functional. Also added another basket for rice mixes.

And I added another extendable shelf for the cans. It’s still not 100% ideal, but it’s a lot better than before. {Why don’t they just make all alike canned food items stackable?? Only things like tuna and a few other limited canned items are stackable and it’s so frustrating!}

On the bottom we have a recycling bin, and then extra soda cans and potatoes can go in the other blue bin.

I’ve never organized the freezer, really, and now we have a chest freezer in the garage, so I could clean out some items and put them out there. I had a lot of open bags of the same frozen veggies, so I consolidated and put them in Ziplocs—which looks nice too.

The End!!! I love how much more functional everything is! The cupboards & pantries are still looking good, a couple weeks later, and everything has a place to go instead of being shoved wherever there is room.