Tips for organizing your new kitchen

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Posted: August 5, 2019 - Homebuyer's Blog

Portrait of mature African-American couple with moving boxes in kitchen.

It’s time to move into your new home. The sheer number of items you’ll be moving into your kitchen makes it harder to organize than practically any other room in your house. Here’s a kitchen organization plan from Hartz Homes that can bring joy and success to this task.

Why organize your kitchen in the first place?

It will save you money because you will no longer buy duplicates. You’ll know what you have on hand, and you’ll have a vague idea of how many items you have in storage.

It will save time because you’ll know where everything is. You will no longer need to hunt through cabinets to find the rice cooker.

Organized kitchen cabinets will make meal planning and grocery shopping easier. When you know what you have, on hand, it’s a lot easier to plan meals and shop for ingredients. You’ll have a good idea what you use most often and what items you can move out of your prime real estate.

It will make cooking much easier. Moving the right tools, into the most efficient spaces, means less time wasted running around the kitchen trying to locate the right sized pot lid.

Organized kitchens are easier for family members and guests. They can find what they need in the kitchen without a hunting expedition.

It will make cleaning easier. When everyone in the household is used to items being in the same spot, they will be more likely to put it back into its proper space.

Remember: function is key

At its basic level, organizing kitchen cabinets means arranging your kitchen tools in ways that make a lot of sense to you and your family.

Do not get caught up in appearances; no one is Martha except Martha. The most important thing is to make everything you regularly use as accessible as possible.

Place items where you use them

If you always stand in front of the stove while cooking, you want everything you use when preparing meals to be as close as possible to the oven. Don’t put your spices in a cabinet on the other side of the kitchen out of your reach. If you want your small kids to get their own snacks or dishes, place the items they’ll need in the cabinets they can reach.

Separate Food from dishes, cookware, and utensils

In any kitchen, remembering where you put something away starts with reserving some cabinets for anything that’s edible and others for anything that’s not. Preferably, the separation will have some logic to it—food to the left and tableware to the right, or food in the upper cabinets and everything else in the lower ones. If you have a tiny little kitchen with only one cabinet, create separate sections in that one cabinet.

Categorize

Maximize storage by sorting items into categories. Even within the separation above, you can break items down into categories that will make it easier to use your kitchen. For example, say you move all of your edible items to your two left-hand cabinets. You can then decide that one of these is for cans, and one for other types of packaging. One could be for frequently used foods and one for the stuff you reach for less often. One could be for healthy meal staples and the other for fun snacks.

The specifics are up to you, but the goal is to think of something and know exactly where to find it. Similarly, create one section of a cabinet for plates, one for bowls, one for wine glasses, one for other glasses, and so on. The more you adhere to these categories, the less you (or others in your household) will ask, “Where’s that blue cup?”

Give frequently used items priority

If you drink coffee from a mug every day and drink wine from a wine glass once a month, your coffee mugs should go in the front. If you keep certain foods or serving platters around because you use them on rare occasions, put them in the back.

Be neat

Turning a jumble into an organized set-up makes everything in your cabinets easy to see and to access. Try to keep labels facing out, boxes lined up and bowls stacked in order of size.

Start with upper cabinets

These items are best stored in the upper cabinets. If possible, locate them in the cabinets above the counter where they will be used most often:

What to store in your bottom cabinets:

The bottom cabinets are a good place for non-food items:

Maintain kitchen cabinet organization

Plan to go through your cabinets and do a complete overhaul once or twice a year, depending on what type of cook you are.

Please check out these new home communities from Hartz Homes:
Armitage Pointe of Addison, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Bella Vista Townhomes of Bolingbrook, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Lago Vista of Lockport, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Leigh Creek of New Lenox, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Marquis Pointe of Montgomery, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Marywood Meadows of Montgomery, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Nantucket Lakes of New Lenox, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Park West of Manteno, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Playa Vista of Plainfield, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Shannon Estates of New Lenox, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Sky Harbor of New Lenox, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Whisper Creek of Mokena, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)

Hartz Homes has new home communities in:
Addison, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Aurora, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Bolingbrook, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Lockport, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
New Lenox (Chicago area new home construction)
Manteno, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Mokena, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Montgomery, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)
Plainfield, Illinois (Chicago area new home construction)