8 golden rules for decluttering your kitchen
Kitchens can be a bit of a challenge to organise and declutter. Storage and lack thereof is a fairly universal dilemma, especially when there is a temptation to consider everything – from your ladles to your egg timer – as a kitchen essential.
Whilst there are plenty of decorating tricks and storage solutions that you can use, there are also some more pragmatic organisational decisions to be made.
Here we look at eight golden rules for decluttering a kitchen and making the most of your space.
1. Tackle your cupboards first and foremost
It is likely that a household could be harbouring bags of flour, cereal, spices, oils, gravy granules and other dried goods that are out of date. It feels wasteful to throw things out, so they are stored for months on end to little avail. This is where we all lose valuable cupboard space and ultimately contribute to food waste (read our handy guide: Fruit and vegetable storage: Ideas to waste less food.)
Throwing out expired goods should be your first decluttering task, and extend it to cleaning products that you don't use, old dishcloths that are past their best, and the sundries that fill up valuable drawer space like Tupperware boxes, sewing kits, old bills, and instruction leaflets for long forgotten kitchen appliances.
When Escape to the Chateau's Angel Strawbridge declutters her cupboards, she clears them completely. "I always take everything out of the room where I am decluttering. Literally everything and then give it a good scrub. Sometimes it's a huge room, like our barn, and other times it's just a cupboard," she recently told Country Living.
"The stuff you use regularly automatically goes back into those cupboards and drawers. You then end up with a load of things you don't need, which makes the decluttering process much easier."
2. Give everything a home
Every single item in your kitchen, from your coffee machine to your teaspoons, should have a designated home that contributes to its overall flow. Visiting various cupboards, drawers and jars to make a cup of tea is not the most efficient use of your space.
Consider creating small zones to facilitate your most important kitchen tasks. If you have a corner where you do most of your cooking prep, prop up a chopping board, add a magnetic strip for knives or hang pots and pans nearby. The same applies for tea or coffee – you can create a station where mugs, tea bags, a kettle and teaspoons are all in one place.
Your least-used items, if not thrown out, can be stored in your harder to reach spots on top of a cupboard or in a utility room.
3. Look at your spares and single-use items
It's easy to accumulate duplicates in the kitchen – mugs, spatulas, chopping boards and serving plates are often culprits – that contribute to clutter.
"Scrutinise your kitchen belongings and recycle or donate any duplicates along with items you don’t actually use. You’ll be amazed at how much extra space and storage you free up," says Jen Nash, senior design lead at Magnet. "Whilst it's also tempting to invest in the latest kitchen gadgets, such as bagel cutters or egg slicers, it's more efficient to get into the habit of investing in kitchen items that have more than one use."
The box method: If you're unsure whether to get rid of a kitchen item or appliance, try the box method. Put it in a box and store it out of sight. If in a month or two you need the appliance, keep it. If you never think about it again then it’s probably time to donate, recycle or sell it
4. Maximise existing storage
Insufficient or poorly designed storage space could be contributing to the clutter in your kitchen.
Cupboards with a single shelf will be a barrier to maximising your storage space. Most cupboards are manufactured with interchangeable shelving, and even with modest DIY skills, inserting extra shelves will make a huge difference to storage capacity.
Consider too if the inside of your cupboard door could be adapted with a shallow spice rack or hooks to hang larger utensils like ladles or spatulas, or if corner units can be fitted with pull-out LeMans shelves.
Decluttering tip: Wine glass holders can be mounted underneath shelves, and glasses look quite elegant hanging by their stems in a group.
5. Practical over pretty
Decanting dried goods into Kilner jars, or fruit into baskets is far more aesthetically pleasing than keeping packets and containers, but in a cluttered kitchen, it can be a bit of a trap. They look lovely in a spacious pantry, but squashed into your average kitchen cupboard, they take up a lot of valuable space.
Decanting food also comes with a lot of hassle – you might have more flour or rice than fits in the jar, leaving you with leftovers to rehome. Instead, keep everything in its original packaging, but group into more attractive baskets or trays. If you do want to decant, buy square jars for a more efficient use of cupboard space.
6. Contain anything on your countertop
If your appliances or utensils spill out onto countertops – or indeed if you have some lovely decorative objects that you want to display – try containing them on a tray or wooden board so they don't migrate around the kitchen. This is a nice design trick for any surface in your home, allowing for decoration but minimising footprint.
In the kitchen, you might want to consider using trays on casters or a Lazy Susan.
7. Digitise your cookbooks
Propping up a selection of cookbooks on your kitchen shelves never fails to look stylish. It is a record too of meals cooked and places visited, and a well for inspiration whenever it is lacking. But clutter rarely ensues from a few well-selected cookbooks, but rather from getting totally carried away with piles and piles of them, splashed with pasta sauce, with scribbled post-its notes stuck to their jackets.
If this is a case, start the process of digitising. Take photos of your favourite recipes or download inexpensive Kindle versions of your favourite cookbooks, and only display a handful that you use regularly.
8. Overlap storage and display
If your cupboards are really overflowing, there is opportunity for some of your kitchen essentials to double as decorative display in a way that looks intentional rather than cluttered.
In lieu of kitchen cabinets, your walls can be lined with shelves to hold excess plates and bowls. It's also attractive to have pots and pans suspended over an island or hung in a neat row under a shelf, and copper or brass railings can hold your kitchen linens or larger utensils.
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