12 Tips for Organizing Your Kitchen Cabinets

The more time you spend in your kitchen cooking, eating, hosting, and hanging out, the more essential organizing your kitchen cabinets becomes. Decluttering and organizing your cabinets not only streamlines the cooking process. It also makes your kitchen a more aesthetically-pleasing and easy-to-clean space.

Of course, maintaining order within your kitchen cabinets can seem like a daunting and never-ending task. Luckily, there are ways to corral the clutter and more efficiently organize your dishes, cookware, spices, and more.

With that in mind, here are 12 tips that can help you tackle the challenge and finally get those kitchen cabinets organized:

How to Organize Kitchen Cabinets: The Four Essentials

1. Clear the Clutter – If you’re wondering how to organize kitchen cabinets, the first essential step is to remove all the dinnerware, cookware, and food items from the cabinets, dispose of anything you no longer use, or any food that is past its expiration date.
2. Clean the Cabinets – Using a multi-surface cleaner or degreaser spray, thoroughly clean the inside and outside of your cabinets.
3. Examine the Cabinets – Measure your cabinet space and take note of all the dividers, organizers, and additional shelving that you currently have to get a better idea of where to put items.
4. Separate Kitchen Items – Prior to re-filling your kitchen cabinets, group all similar items together on your countertops. Foodstuffs, dinnerware, drinking glasses, and cleaning supplies all get their own pile.

More Kitchen Cabinet Organization Ideas

     1. Stack Items by Usage – When organizing your kitchen cabinets, it’s not enough to simply separate the kitchen items into groupings like glasses and plates. For real efficiency, group items into individual uses. 

For instance, rather than stacking plates of different sizes in the same pile, causing you to pull larger plates from the teetering pile, group the plates by dinner plates, snack plates, etc. The same goes for glassware. Don’t just jumble all the glasses together—separate them into different styles and uses.

       2. Think Outside the Cabinet – Just because an item traditionally goes in a cabinet or drawer doesn’t mean you can’t get creative in thinking about new ways to store it. A two-prong towel bar by the sink, for instance, or a simple pegboard or adhesive hook on the sides of cabinets, can be a great way to hang towels, cutlery, cutting boards, and other kitchen utensils in a functional, stylistic way.

       3. Go with the Flow – Organizing your kitchen by activity flow can be a great way to streamline various tasks. Putting the mugs above the coffee maker—or getting them out of the cabinet and putting them on a mug holder on the counter—is just one example of pairing kitchen items to make your kitchen “go with the flow.” 

       4. Organize According to Weight – Among the more intuitive kitchen cabinet organization ideas is putting heavy pans, bowls, and large serving dishes in lower cabinets, while keeping items like spices and lighter kitchen utensils up higher. It’s a great way to both avoid injury and prevent neglecting cookware because it’s so difficult to reach. 

Additionally, you can add heavy-duty two-tier pull-out baskets to make things even easier on your back.

       5. Maximize the Capacity of Cabinets – Many cabinets have shelves that can be adjusted or added to in order to maximize space, but for those large blind-corner cabinets–which typically go underutilized due to it being so difficult to reach or find anything in there–a blind corner organizer can allow for accessibility to the entire unit.

       6. Take Out the Trash – One sneaky way to declutter your kitchen area is to utilize your cabinetry to hide your trash cans. A double 50-quart pull-out waste container is ideal for most cabinet spaces, giving you easy access to the trash container without its unsightly presence detracting from your kitchen aesthetic.

       7. Use Food Storage Containers – Airtight containers can go a long way in improving the shelf life of food, but all those differently sized containers and their corresponding lids can prove a real burden in keeping your kitchen cabinets organized. Try a nesting doll technique with lids stacked vertically and tucked against the side of the cabinet.

       8. Insert Drawer Organizers – Drawer organizers are a great way to keep your cabinet drawers from becoming a mess of smaller kitchen utensils. Many modern-day utility tray inserts feature a simple drop-in installation, giving you a hassle-free way to enhance your organization.   

You no longer have to be worried about how to organize your kitchen cabinets. With a combination of creative thinking and these tried-and-true tips, organizing your kitchen cabinets can transform your kitchen into a stream-lined and stress-free space!