Whether you love to cook or loathe the business of preparing food, you are going to have to spend some time in the kitchen every day. It makes sense to keep that space in your house as organised and efficient as possible. A bit of organisational help from a specialist in property styling services can assist you in creating a kitchen space that is both a joy for the cook, and efficient enough to minimise the time a non-cook must spend there.

Clear the Clutter

The kitchen seems to be the chosen repository for all things of questionable value. It matters not whether or not the item is ever used there. Kitchens seem to be the places where rubber bands, paper clips, toenail clippers, mail, school books, and dog leashes gather. In order to make your space more user friendly, the first step is to eliminate the unnecessary flotsam and jetsam of human life.

Bookkeeping Supplies

Take a morning to sort through the stuff in your ‘junk drawer(s)’. Put those items where they belong. Bills, receipts, and user’s manuals ought to be in the place where you ordinarily use them. Get one of those handy accordion files and file your papers away then put them wherever you sit when you pay the bills. (If this is the kitchen table, fine. Put your “office” stuff in one dedicated drawer or cabinet in the kitchen and close it away.)

Useless Items

Look through your other drawers and cabinets to dispose of other things you don’t use. Mismatched plastic storage containers and lids need to go in the garbage bin. Those goofy gadgets you thought would be handy when you found them at a sale can go there too.
Get rid of the stuff that simply takes up space without providing anything useful or rewarding to the kitchen’s overall mission. Then, when the nonsense is out of the way, find better ways to store the things you actually need in ways that make sense.

Seasonal or Special Occasion Items

Your turkey roaster and the things you haul out when you’re having a party — serving trays and dishes you don’t use otherwise — will be happier in a storage space outside your kitchen. Put them in a large plastic tote and store them in the attic or garage from whence they can be retrieved at an appropriate time.

Take Advantage of Vertical Space

• Store knives on a wall-mounted magnet. They will stay sharper and you’ll be less likely to cut yourself when you reach for them.
• Lose that clever paper towel holder that sits on your valuable counter space. Buy and install one of the wall-mounted variety.
• Save all the bench space you can. An uncluttered benchtop is somehow soothing. We humans get uptight when we are surrounded by chaos. Use your vertical spaces – like the refrigerator door – for your magnetic note-pad and pen. Make use of the walls above the splashback to mount hooks for measuring spoons and the like.
• Put your wooden spoons, spatulas, whisks, and other often-needed tools in an urn near the stove where you use them. Other important but less often used items, like the dough hook to your mixer and the grill accessories you don’t use daily, belong in a lower drawer – save the top drawers for things you need more often.

When you’ve eliminated the things that are generally unnecessary, you will probably have room in your cabinets for the canisters, small appliances – like the electric can opener and the spice grinder, and other items you don’t use every single day.

Minimise

Professionals who provide home staging services will usually leave only one or two things on kitchen benchtops of a staged home. If you’re not ready to list your home for sale and you drink coffee daily, by all means, don’t complicate your life. Leave the coffee maker where you can find it before your eyes are fully open in the morning. Otherwise, keep the counter as clear of clutter as possible.

By storing things in an organised way – like items with like items – and eliminating the things you don’t use, you can bring order to what was a riotous room. You will automatically feel better and more productive when there is an underlying sense of organisation in this popular and sometimes overwhelming room.