9 tips and tricks to organise your kitchen space

If you have limited space in your kitchen, cooking for yourself or your family can be a challenge. The further prospect of having others over for a nice meal or even just a few snacks and drinks can seem overwhelming. With only a small area to prepare food and a pantry stuffed to the brim, it can be hard to locate and organise the ingredients and tools you need.

A cluttered kitchen space can make you anxious about inviting guests to your home. Here are some tips and tricks to help increase your confidence and get those parties underway!

• Create extra space by using hooks on the walls or the ceiling to hang pots and pans. Doing this clears up space in your cabinets and creates a pleasant aesthetic effect. You can also add hooks to the inside of your cabinet and pantry doors and use them to store dish rags, gloves and small buckets of cleaning supplies. Punch holes into fabric or rubber and add grommets in order to hang items more easily.
  
  
• Use wooden or metal dividers to store kitchen supplies upright, such as cutting boards, baking trays, lids for pots and pans, and so on. This will enable you to find the particular item you are looking for quickly.
  
  
• Storage tools for the cabinet and pantry space can be used effectively inside the refrigerator as well. Add wire trays to provide extra shelf space, dividers to line up goods in jars and bottles, and even a small Lazy Susan or turntable to make it easier to retrieve items from the back of the fridge.
  
  
• Similarly, you can use buckets and baskets to organise your cleaning supplies under the sink. You can hang spray bottles from a tension rod, put sponges and scrub brushes in a basket, and store cylindrical containers in a bucket. Make sure any hazardous materials are kept securely away from small children or pets.
  
  
• There are many creative ways to organise spices. For example, storing them in alphabetical order will make it easier to locate the particular spice that you need while you are cooking. You also can line them up on a ledge mounted to the wall to free up space in the pantry or put them on their side on a box shelf, with labels on the top of each container to indicate what it contains.
  
  
• Getting all your ingredients ready before you cook and storing them on a cake stand or tray or Lazy Susan can make it easier to keep track of them and also avoid mess and clutter on the countertop. Once you are finished cooking, it also makes it easier to put everything away.
  
  
• To organise your pantry, divide it into “zones.” Store items used for breakfast on one shelf, items used for baking on another, and so on. Put bulk goods like sugar and flour into labelled glass jars. Use tiered shelving to help you locate items at the back of the pantry. Put similar small items into trays that you can pull out like drawers.
  
  
• Another strategy to avoid clutter in the kitchen is to have one junk drawer where you store items that don’t seem to go anywhere else. This will help keep you from just shoving them into random corners in the pantry or in cabinets, where they will eventually pile up and get in the way. You should also get rid of specialised implements and utensils that you never use, like that ice cream scooper, pizza slicer, or melon baller.
  
  
• Finally, we’re all familiar with multi-hamper storage systems for clothing waiting to be washed that allow us to separate whites from darks from brights. But did you know that there are also dual garbage bins that will let you keep your trash from your recycling without taking up too much extra space in the kitchen? You can even find bins that you can store inside a cabinet or under the sink and pull out when you need to dispose of something.

About the author:

Jessica Johnson works for Extra Space and contributes to the Extra Space Storage blog, exploring various aspects of organising and storing possessions.