Organize Your Kitchen

Confession: I have been hesitant to post about our kitchen storage because we really need to paint inside our cabinets! I thought about it for a while, and then decided that it was really my inner perfectionist holding me back.

Do any of you guys struggle with this? You want things to be perfect, so you add a bunch of extra pressure and work to something & then it just gets overwhelming. Basically, either zero progress ends up being made or you just keep tweaking things right up until the last second, trying to get them EXACTLY right. I honestly think that perfectionism was one of the biggest reasons why I struggled with organization in the past (and even now, obviously)! I would spend all of my time focusing on one thing to make it perfect, and then everything else would get ignored & start crumbling around me. Boo!

In the spirit of celebrating DONE instead of PERFECT, I decided that I’ll shoot our cabinets as-is, because you know what? Our house is a work in progress! (And if I wait until everything is perfect, I’ll probably never have another blog post!)  So, here ya go, our work-in-progress organizing solution under our kitchen sink. 

We added pull-out drawers (SO worth it!), shelves, and cabinet door storage. I also rigged a little storage space for my sponges & repurposed a glass vase to hold scrub brushes for various cleaning tasks.

In the back, I noticed that we had some extra space available, so we installed two little Ikea Lack shelves to store extra cleaning products & alcohol (we usually drink our own home brewed beer & don’t make mixed drinks very often, so we didn’t need them to be as accessible as our everyday items).

Foil, plastic wrap, and the big freezer bags that we use regularly fit nicely inside the cabinet door on this storage rack.

TIP:  Measure where you’ll be storing items very carefully. Make sure they have enough space on the door & that they won’t hit any of the items you’re storing inside the cabinet when the door is closed or when you pull out a cabinet drawer!

I looooove the pull-out drawers that we added! They have really helped make the deeper parts of the cabinet so much more accessible!

Left Drawer: Extra dish liquid, plastic bags, and regularly used cleaning products. The blue box contains clean used bags that we keep around for storing various non-food items. I just wrapped a cardboard box with pretty paper to make it cuter.

Right Drawer: Large, regularly used gadgets (for us, it’s our little air popper & slow cooker) & their accessories (liners for the slow cooker and kernels & seasoning for the popcorn). I will probably wrap the cardboard box I’m using for my popcorn station & make it pretty, but for now it is serving its purpose very well!

Here’s another little space-saver to help organize your kitchen! I grabbed an old basket and used velcro zip ties to attach it to a pipe & utilize the wasted space above it. I didn’t want to add a lot of weight to the pipe, so I use this basket to store various sponges. You could probably make it cuter if you use white zip ties or pretty ribbon, but these were what I had, and they work great!

Seriously, I just get WAY too much joy out of creating extra storage in a previously wasted space! Stay tuned — I’ll be working my way through the rest of our kitchen over the next few weeks, and I’m sharing some more of my favorite cabinet space savers later on this week! How do you organize your kitchen? Are there any kitchen-related storage questions you’re just itching to ask? Leave me a comment & I’ll try my best to help out

P.S. If you haven’t seen these kitchen storage posts yet, check out my favorite space-saving step stool, this sweet wall-mounted knife rack, a smoothie station with a secret, & some super simple magnetic oven mitt storage!

I’m sharing this project at The House of Smiths, OrgJunkie, and the Organize It! link party