How to organize your kitchen cupboards, including what to do with that pesky plastic ware! Five easy steps to having beautifully organized kitchen cupboards!
TODAY’S FREEBIE
Hi friends! So glad you’re here! In this week’s “Declutter This” series, I’m highlighting kitchen cupboards.
In my Declutter This — Home Organization for Everyone group on Facebook, a member submitted these pictures and asked how to organize her kitchen cupboards.
As you can see, she has a love for all things Disney, a ton of plastic cups, and loads of plastic containers.
Here’s the advice I gave her (and that I would give to you as well):
Number one
Before you begin decluttering and organizing your kitchen, try to make sure that as many dishes as possible are clean. I know that it is practically impossible to have every single dish clean at the same time, but you really want to have the majority clean so you know what you’re dealing with.
It would be a bummer to get everything all nice and organized, and then unload the dishwasher and find a bunch more kitchenware you didn’t plan on when you got everything looking so pretty.
Number two
Are you hiding things in your kitchen cupboards that should be displayed or stored?
In this case, she had some Disney mugs and other items that really should not be taking up cupboard space and should either be displayed elsewhere (so she can enjoy them) or stored elsewhere.
Number three
Which leads me to my next point. Whenever you declutter anything, you need to ask yourself, “Do I love it?” For the kitchen, I suggest an additional requirement: “Do I use it?”
In this case, she may love all her Disneyware, but not use a lot of it. Therefore, it belongs elsewhere.
Number four
All those plastic cups can be a problem. (Let’s also apply this to water bottles. If you’re like me, you have a bunch of water bottles in your cupboards, and you don’t even remember getting most of them!)
First of all, get rid of any you don’t love and use. Secondly, a great idea from Better Homes and Gardens is to use a magazine holder flipped on its side in your cupboard to hold your water bottles. It may also work for large plastic cups with lids.
Number five
Plastic ware is a HUGE issue for most of us! It’s so annoying trying to wrangle all the lids and keep things from falling out of the cupboards. I have a three-pronged approach for this:
- First, get rid of any plastic ware that is not see-through. Just recycle it or throw it away. For example, take-out containers, Cool Whip containers–and all those containers you’ve saved from other things you’ve bought. If you can’t see through it, it’s no good. Why? Because as we all know, if you can’t see it, you forget about it and it ends up at the back of the refrigerator and turns into a Petri dish. Nobody likes opening a lid to a “mystery food item” and finding pink and green fuzz.
- Take all the plastic containers out of your cupboard and make sure everything has lids. If it’s missing a lid, time to recycle or throw it out. Furthermore, if you have some containers you just don’t like (maybe the lid is really hard to remove and you end up flinging food across the kitchen or swearing every time you try to get it off), time to get rid of them as well.
- Finally, put all the lids in a separate container (like a plastic shoe box or large plastic box) standing up on their sides. Don’t stack them on top of each other. Now you can nest your plastic containers, and then just pull out the corresponding lid from your box of lids. No more lids falling out all over the place or searching for one that fits.
Picture of upright lids from Better Homes and Gardens
That is it! I actually gave her a few more pieces of advice in the video. You can join the Declutter This — Home Organization for Everyone Facebook group and watch the video yourself!
Every week, I do a new video helping someone with a specific challenge. If you have an area in your home you’d like help with, join the group and submit your pictures!
TODAY’S FREEBIE
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