If your kitchen cupboards and drawers are a jumbled mess of mix-and-match cutlery, Tupperware with no lids, baby food jars and empty cereal boxes, it’s time to do some organizing to make life easier. Try these tips to decrease clutter and increase efficiency in your kitchen.
- The first big step to compartmentalizing a drawer is creating dividers. This is easy with cardboard, scissors and shelf paper. Simply cut strips of cardboard to size and cover with shelf paper. Leave a little notch on the ends so that the cardboard dividers can interlock.
- An egg carton is great for the little items that end up in a junk drawer. It also helps keep visual order in the drawer so that you can immediately see what is in each small space.
- Pick up a pre-assembled utility basket or even a utensil holder that matches the dimensions of your drawer to quickly begin to get things in order.
- Use ice-cube trays to hold the little items that normally slide around in the bottom of the drawer.
- By using an open-weave cutlery tray and grouping similar items together, you can transform the cutlery drawer into a more organized junk drawer.
- If you have an old dresser that you don’t need, save the drawers. Just buy four caster wheels and screw them onto the four bottom corners of the drawer. Now you can roll the drawer to any spare corner of the kitchen.
- Use a cardboard bottle divider from a liquor or wine case to create small compartments in a drawer.
- Totally empty junk drawers and throw out all of the unused items. This will give you more space than you ever imagined.
- Using drawing pins (available at craft stores), attach elastic along either side of the drawer. This way you can store small bottles, film canisters or baby food jars in drawers without having to worry about them spilling, breaking or just rolling around.
- Empty pill bottles or film canisters work great for holding elastic, paper clips and other tiny items.