Keeping your kitchen cupboards organized is the first step to enjoying using your kitchen. However, it’s not an easy step for everyone. Organization is a skill that takes practice. Furthermore, kitchen cupboards involve fitting many differently-shaped items, all with different uses and levels of importance. It’s not as straightforward as packing things into a box for later; the contents of your cupboards need to remain accessible by priority. So, here are some tricks for organizing your kitchen cupboards.
Keeping Useful Backstock Only
The first step in organizing your kitchen cupboards is to only keep backstock that’s useful. What is backstock? It’s all of that food you keep around because you’ll use it one day, but not all today. Canned veggies and bags of rice are great backstock for when you want to make soup one rainy day.
However, a huge chunk of people’s cupboard space is often overtaken by backstock food items. If you can never seem to make room for new groceries, and you can’t really figure out why, there’s a good chance it’s that you simply have too much backstock.
To cut down on how much space is taken up by backstock, start by checking expiration dates. You’ll be surprised how many things have been sitting untouched for 5 years.Yes – even when you swear you didn’t buy them that long ago.
After removing expired foods, if you still have quite a few boxes of instant food or canned items, pull some of it out for use this week. Make 3 recipe piles on your counter and pile some backstock food into them. This week, you can surely use some of it up by making soup, chili, a rice dish, or some other food that uses lots of preserved food.
Separating Spices
One of the biggest mistakes people make with their cupboard space is keeping their spices with everything else. Separate your spices. No matter how you cut it, spices do not stack well. Trying to find what you’re looking for will lead to knocking over stacks and making an organizational disaster.
Instead, opt for a wire spice rack that can be mounted on the pantry well. Another option is a countertop spice rack – maybe one that swivels. But, perhaps our favorite method of storage: use a drawer. A shallow drawer that isn’t big enough for much else is great for storing spices. Lay them down so their labels face up and line them up in your drawer. Finding spices will become easy as pie and they won’t fall all over while you look.
Storing Appliances Outside the Pantry
Another mistake that’s commonly made is storing appliances in the pantry. Organizing your kitchen cupboards becomes way easier when you don’t have to navigate around a crockpot. If you have a tall pantry as well as cabinets, store appliances in lower cabinets or on a wire rack instead of in the pantry. The pantry is easier to access than lower cupboards, so it should be used for food, which you need more often.
