The Great Kitchen Reorganization

This is one of those posts that will probably only amuse me. However, I spent half of yesterday reorganizing my kitchen. I'm not good at cleaning and I tend to be a little cluttered at the best of time, but the one space where I really think about how things go is in the kitchen. I know that sometimes it doesn't look like there is a system, but there is.

The trick with organizing my kitchen is twofold. 1. I have almost no pantry space because what had been a pantry was turned into a laundry room by the previous owners. 2. I have a well equipped and provisioned kitchen which translates to: I have a lot of stuff. The fact that we eat a large variety of legumes and grains complicates this. So, I've taken to keeping much or our dry goods store in attractive containers on the counters. Additionally, somehow my counters became the mail drop spot which has a bad tendency to spread and having a kid means a lot of prepacking food which means a lot of tupperware. Lots of clutter.

We went to Costco and ran across a twelve pack of my favorite oxo containers at a good price. They are not cheap, but they are life savers for me given how much dried bean and grain I keep on hand. Before the discovery of the oxo containers, everything was in some sort of plastic bag (which tended to tear) and got shoved in random nooks and crannies (which meant I lost track of them). These oxo containers are durable, attractive, and stack well. By using them, I can see what I have and I don't tend to lose track of what I have and overbuy as much.

So, I bought the twelve pack of oxos as an early birthday present to myself. Yay. That combined with the spice racks my dad gifted to me was the basis of my project. However, the problem, then,was that in order to use the oxos and the racks, I needed to deal with the encroaching clutter. Ok, it's a sad truth that life can be a bit overwhelming. When we bought the house five years ago, things started to get pretty busy. We bought the house and then rather soon after got pregnant. When we moved in, I organized in a way that I knew would eventually need to get revised. So, I moved the mail off the counter (don't ask where I put it), I emptied two drawers that hadn't been properly utilized and threw away a lot of the old fish supplies, since I'm not currently keeping a fish tank and much of was expired. I put all the cooking spoons, spatulas and related cooking implements in one of the drawers (except for the potato masher because those things just never fit in drawers....grrrr).

I reorganized one of the cabinets, discovered I own a wok, and made space for the blender, food processor, and standing mixer which had been languishing behind a bank of the previous oxos. This had made them almost entirely unusable. Now I'll be able to get at them. I also moved all the attachments for the appliances over with them which freed up space in a cabinet. Ah ha! I moved all of Thomas's Tupperware up off the counter and into the vacated space.

I moved my potato and citrus storage rack over into the space vacated by the stand mixer which meant I could move all the onions up off the floor and into a colander on the opposite side of the counter. Incidentally, you shouldn't keep your potatoes stored next to onions, they each release chemicals that cause each other to decay faster.

Ok, so time to start filling oxos. I moved the coffee into one of them...which looks a lot better and is better for keeping the coffee anyway. I reorganized some of my higher use legumes and grains into bigger oxos, and got a lot of my more medium use ones out of bags. The masa harina finally got an oxo of it's own as did my mix grain blend I like to use when I'm getting bored with the usual grain options. All the spices that were in small enough jars went into the rack and I moved the tubs (I need to buy some more spice jars) up ontop of the rack, I moved the knife block, bread box, and battery charger.

So, in the end I tripled my usable counter space. I can see everything I need to see, finally, and the space looks less cluttered. I also netted an empty drawer somehow.

Good times.