Spatulas and tongs and slotted spoons, oh my. Is that how you feel about your new kitchen? Are you relocating or just having trouble locating your can opener? Kitchen planning will take just a few minutes, but you will feel the effects for as long as you live in your new kitchen (or your renewed kitchen). Watch this video for some organizing tips and moving tips to help you organize your house- kitchen first.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDKitchen.)
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about organizing kitchens.
A friend of mine just remodeled her kitchen, and she was getting ready to move everything back in, so she was asking me for some advice about that, and I realized when I was helping her that I should make a video about this process that I invented. I invented this on a job many years ago with many clients in many different new homes and remodeling situations. Also, sometimes we use this process when someone’s just completely overhauling their kitchen and reorganizing the whole thing. So, here’s what you do. You just need a stack of post-it notes and a marker and a little bit of thinking and you can do this yourself. Now, I actually did end up making this process into a product, and this product makes it a lot easier because everything’s preprinted, and there’s a lot of tips and instructions that really would help you do it better. But again, you can do it yourself, so let’s talk about how to do that.
There are over 50 categories of things in the kitchen that you have to put away and find a home for. So things like your everyday drinking glasses, your everyday dishes, your potholders, your pots and pans, everything like that needs a home in your kitchen and you need to logically place that so that it makes the most sense for the workflow and so that everyone can find things.
So, what you do is you take each of those categories, and here I’m going to use the example of spices, and you write each category on a single post-it note, and then you place those around the kitchen on the outside of the cabinets where those items need to be put away. You’re doing this before you’re unpacking anything or moving anything around and the reason is that it’s very time and labor intensive if you change your mind in a kitchen organizing project. It is very tedious to move delicate stemware one piece at a time and you have to have people helping you move some of that sometimes, and it’s just a lot better to logic your way through the kitchen first before you start putting things in the drawers and the cabinets.
So you place all of these around. This is near the stove and the microwave. This is the point of use for this item. So that’s how you think through your strategy. You might want to put the silverware near the dishwasher and the table for example. So once you’ve done that, you then put everything away. If you use our product, we already have all of this stuff preprinted with all of those categories on it and a lot of them have tips right on the label so that it actually helps you think through this. And these have the same kind of post-it adhesive, and you can put those on and again change your mind as much as you want before you have stuff in there. And then you’ve got a really well-organized kitchen, you’re all finished. Here’s the cool part. You can leave these up as long as you want. They’re just post-it adhesives, so you can take them down when you’re ready. But when you have just moved in to a new situation, you often have trouble finding things in the new place. And so does your family. So you’re going to hear, “Mom, where’s this?” and, “Mom, where’s that?” Well, this will give everybody a guide to where everything belongs. So, you can take that down whenever you’re ready, and that is how you organize a kitchen completely and thoroughly.
I hope this helps you. If you’d like some more information, this product is called “The Spacescaping Kitchen Organizing System.” You can see more about it at https://www.clutterdiet.com/kitchen.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for tips on kitchen organization or how to decide where to put things in a kitchen.
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