Organising your kitchen can sometimes be an impossible task. With children or flatmates, pans that don't fit in the cupboard, 50 water bottles that don't belong to anyone, sauce stains on the worktop, 3 meals a day (to cook)... It quickly becomes chaos. But a tidy kitchen has a huge impact on your day-to-day mood - we'll explain why at the end of this article. So, to help you out, here are 8 professional tips for keeping your kitchen clean and tidy!
This article was written by La Fée du tri, organisation professional and home organising trainer (https://www.feedutri.com)
TIP N°1: LIGHTEN YOUR CUPBOARDS TO KEEP YOUR KITCHEN ORGANISED
Want to organise your kitchen efficiently? Start by making space. We tend to store large quantities of food in our cupboards, sometimes without even realising it.
Our advice: get everything out (cupboards, fridge, freezer) and make a menu list of all the food you already have at home.
What type of products do you have? What can you cook with them? What recipes can you come up with? It's all great fun, so don't hesitate to get the whole family involved. You'll save space and money at the same time.
Bonus: observe and note if there are any foods you buy but never eat. Sometimes they catch your eye in the shop, but you always end up throwing them away. You can then decide to stop buying them, knowing that you won't be cooking them.
TIP N° 2: SORT YOUR KITCHEN UTENSILS
We're continuing to make space: head for the kitchen utensils.
This time, do the same thing: take everything out, lay it out in front of you and sort it. Keep only what you really need (at least every month). Get rid of anything that's broken, useless, unused, not practical for you or your cooking habits (like the chicken roasting utensil...), or anything you have in duplicate.
You don't keep "just in case" items. Do you have two corkscrews? Keep just one. Got three can openers? Give two to your neighbours. You've got the idea.
TIP N°3: ORGANISE YOUR KITCHEN BY CATEGORY
Once you've made space, you can move on to tidying up. Now's the time to roll up your sleeves and get your kitchen organised for the long term (there's no question of repeating the operation 5 times a year).
The aim is to arrange everything in a way that's simple and logical for you, so that you can find your way around quickly. That's how your organisation will last over time.
To do this, put each category in the same place in your kitchen: one cupboard/shelf = one category. Here are some ideas for categories
- utensils ;
- crockery ;
- jars ;
- food ;
- household appliances ;
- household products ;
- etc.
Next, you can organise the shelves in the same cupboard (and therefore in the same category) into sub-categories. For example, for your food cupboard, you might have :
- one shelf for sweet foods ;
- another for savoury
- yet another for breakfast ;
- and so on.
You can create lots of sub-categories. For jars, for example: jars for groceries or bulk products, jars for storing in the fridge, jars for preserving, etc.
TIP N°4: TIDY UP YOUR KITCHEN EVERY NIGHT TO WAKE UP ENERGISED
Organising your kitchen properly also means keeping it clean and clutter-free - apart from the shelves. For this, our best tip is the family or flatmate plan.
What do you mean by this? We invite you to draw up a kitchen tidying/cleaning schedule. Every evening, the designated person sets aside a few minutes to tidy up and clean the kitchen.
Of course, each week it's a different person's turn.
TIP N°5: ORGANISE YOUR FRIDGE EFFICIENTLY
Organising your fridge is great fun, as it makes everything quickly visible, preserves food properly and makes it easier to clean.
It's up to you to organise it according to your habits and specific needs. For example, you could store dairy products at the top, ready meals in the middle and vegetables at the bottom.
You can also divide your shelves by household member - this is often done in shared accommodation. Maybe you do your shopping separately. Or maybe you have special dietary requirements (vegetarian, allergies, baby, etc.).
If you prefer to organise things by floor, but still want to create dividers on each floor, the Color Vis range will be perfect! You can choose one colour for jars with meat and another for jars without meat. Or one colour for you and another for your partner, and so on.
The possibilities are endless.
TIP N°6: ORGANISE YOUR KITCHEN WITH BASKETS
The kitchen is often a buffer zone in the house. Clutter quickly sets in. Creating an area with small baskets bearing the name of each person in the family can make all the difference!
This way, all the small items lying around in the kitchen that need to be dispatched to other rooms in the house go into these baskets. Once a week, the person in charge of household chores (tip 4) will take the baskets to everyone's bedroom.
Once the small items have been put away, the baskets return to the dedicated area in the kitchen, and there they go again for another week.
TIP N°7: PRACTICE BATCH COOKING AS A FAMILY
Have you heard of batch cooking? It's a term used to describe cooking in batches. In practical terms, the principle is simple: with your menu list, you block off a slot in the week (often Sunday) to cook all the dishes to come.
This saves you a considerable amount of time. And best of all, you only really cook once a week. After that, all you have to do is reheat and add any fresher ingredients (raw vegetables, for example).
So your kitchen stays neat and tidy all week long. It's a dream!
TIP N°8: THE 2-MOVEMENT TECHNIQUE FOR TIDYING UP YOUR KITCHEN
Our 8th and final tip for organising your kitchen is a very practical one: it's called the two-movement technique.
The idea is to keep everything tidy and simple, so that you don't need to make more than two movements to grab or replace crockery/food/etc.
In this case, open shelving is an excellent idea. You can create pretty spaces with jars of different sizes (always arranged by category, of course) containing your bulk products.
If you don't have open shelves, that's okay. Use lazy suzans in your closed cupboards. These are essential for arranging all your round containers on them and turning them to see and access everything easily.
Why organise your kitchen?
And if you're wondering why you're doing all this? As we said in the introduction, having an organised kitchen may be more important than you think.
It's important because the kitchen is not a living space that you immediately think of, compared with the living room, for example. And yet, with the omnipresence of screens these days - and especially TV in the living room - we end up spending more time with the family in the kitchen, at mealtimes. It's becoming a special place for getting together.
It's also important because the kitchen is the place where you eat and look after yourself. A tidy, clean kitchen has a considerable impact on the well-being of everyone in the household. It makes you want to get together - with your family, flatmates, friends, etc. - and share good times.
So, are you ready to organise your kitchen like a pro?