There’s a school of thought amongst profession declutterers  that says you should try to treat your space with a little more respect if you really want to take control of your clutter.  The theory goes that the inside of your home is a reflection of you and the organisation within should reflect the life you want to live.  Getting organised and decluttering your pad could therefore be the answer to enjoying the space you live in and maybe also allow you to take a little more control of your life.

With this mantra in mind, I have a New Year’s confession…despite being a purveyor of storage solutions, my own kitchen (specifically the storage space in my kitchen) is currently in a terrible mess. I’m not sure whether it’s the product of having a new baby and no time on our hands or just the fact that we’ve abused our kitchen storage cupboards over Christmas in the rush to fatten-up our guests!

Deciding that the best way to spend the first real Friday night of the New Year was to declutter our kitchen storage cupboards, I set to work (post Celebrity Big Brother) to find a solution to my resolution and take control of our cluttered kitchen.

I must say having completed the task at a shade before midnight I got a real buzz from seeing all the neatly stored tins and tidy cutlery drawers despite the fact that my partner now says she can’t find a thing!

So, while they’re fresh in my mind, here’s my New Year tips for organising your kitchen storage space:

1. Bin Items You Don’t Use…
Up until last night, our kitchen drawers looked like we were collecting utensils to pass down through the generations! We really don’t need 2 blunt bread knifes, the fancy cork screw that doesn’t really work but looks funky and 5 biro pens in the cutlery drawer. So I decided to have a purge and recycle the stuff that’s broken and take anything remotely useful but rarely used to the local charity shop.

2. Containerise With Storage Baskets…

Wicker and seagrass baskets can create a great ordered look on your kitchen shelves and will allow you to group, order and more easily find items. Stash all your tins of soup in a wicker basket on a kitchen shelf and tea-towels in another, or how about using a seagrass basket to store condiments inside a cupboard for easy access when they’re all needed on the dinner table together.

3. Label What you Can’t See…
My partner loves her recipes and has a pile of cookbooks stored inside three big old biscuit tins in a kitchen cupboard next to the cooker. Scrawling “books” on a label is a good start but “Cookbooks” is better; “Recipes: Cakes” or “Pudding Recipes” will make finding a particularly tasty dessert even more easy.

4. Go Visit Our Online Storage Solutions Shop!…
Ok, ok I couldn’t resist a plug at the end. We’ve some really neat kitchen storage solutions in our online shop and here are a few of my favourites:

Drawer Organiser Set No. 2
Simple plastic trays that are tailored to fit standard UK kitchen drawers. Move ‘em around within your kitchen drawers for better storage of utensils and cutlery.

Corner Plate Rack
Neat cost effective storage solution to make the most of kitchen cupboard corners and ensure that all your dinner plates are stacked and organised separately from your side plates.

Spice Stepper
Handy 3-tiered item to store inside your kitchen cupboards to ensure that your spice jars at the rear of the cupboard can be seen and are as easy-to-hand as those at the front.

Mesh Stacking Shelves
Creates extra storage space where there was none. These handy chaps make the most of unused vertical space in your kitchen cupboards.

Sachet & Packet Store
Compact tiered storage box to organise all those sauce sachets, cup-a-soup packets and powered custard sachets etc..

Here’s to a Happy and Organised New Year!    Si

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Storage Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.