Entries Tagged 'Kitchen Organizing' ↓

The liner that you place under a dish rack is a quick, easy and inexpensive fix for keeping things clean under your kitchen sink.  I place my garbage can and another small basket filled with scrubbing supplies on mine.  It is so easy to pull out, scrub down, dry and place back under the sink.  It beats having little spills hit and stick to the wood, which requires a lot more scrubbing.  My plastic liner has lasted for many years. 

Stay on top of home organization and take a cleaning shortcut with a dish rack liner!

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Home organization is NOT about being perfect, no sir! I’m a professional organizer, so, yes, my house is very organized.  But is it perfect?  Nope and neither am I.  Is stuff making it cluttered or stressful in my home?    Nope.  Everything has a home so we know where to put things away.  BUT, as much as I like order, I do tend to explode into rooms when I am in a hurry.  Getting dressed in the morning often means leaving clothes on the floor until I get home later in the day.  Not having the dishwasher emptied may mean dishes are backed up on the counter.  The photo above is pretty darn tame.  When I cook, I tend to leave open cupboard doors, dishwasher open, pots & pans on the stove, etc.

Sometimes I wonder if my professional organizer side just enjoys restoring order from a mess.  That may be a little messed up huh?  But mainly, I think that’s just how I roll.  I move quick and I make a mess.  Ideally, I would clean as I go and we would all place our dishes in the dishwasher at the end of a meal and the kitchen work would be finished up neat and tidy.  In reality, I’ll probably blow up the kitchen, finish dinner, turn up some loud music and work away at cleaning the kitchen back up. 

I’m a mom, I’m a business owner, I’m busy and my natural habits just tend to make me spread stuff out until I put them right again.  What I love is having everything back in place at the end of the day, turning out the lights and starting the next day fresh and tidy.   So, don’t feel like home organization means you have to be company ready 24/7 if that’s not how you roll!  As for me, I’m working on giving myself enough time to clean up as I go so I don’t have to do so much work at the end of each day.

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Since the kitchen is such a vital center of the home, I look at my kitchen as an important area for home organization, which also means keeping it clean-multiple times a day.  Ug.  Did I mention that the worst chore to me is cleaning out the dishwasher?  But, since staying on top of the kitchen is a necessary evil, I love it when I find shortcuts and easy fixes!  So, here is one that I love for keeping your flat stove top clean:

Take a bottle of the spray oven cleaner that you would use to clean the inside of your oven, spray it on the burners and then turn them all on for a few seconds.  Turn them back off, let the stove top cool a bit and then just wipe clean! 

Super easy and it really works to clean quickly!

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Sometimes it’s amazing just how easy it can be to tweak things for better home organization.  The other day I was busy in the kitchen making school lunches for my kids at the counter.  A long time ago I had moved the sandwich bags to a cabinet right next to the counter where I was assembling lunches.  That worked great to load up chips, crackers and sandwiches.  But the other day I realized I was walking over to the pantry to get the brown bags to put all the lunch items into.  Why not move a stack of those over to the cabinet next to the lunch sandwich bags?  That was easy enough and slid next to the sandwich bags, it didn’t really take up any extra room. 

Just a simple change.  Just a way to save a few steps back and forth.  Not earth shattering, but it didn’t cost anything and when you save a few steps every day, well, it adds up!  It’s all about looking at where you can make processes more efficient; it’s about keeping things that you use often as close to where you use them as possible. 

So, look at the tasks that you do every day and see where you can make small changes that result in better efficiency, less stress and a more organized home!

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Last night I was in my kitchen with my shoes sticking to the floor in multiple spots.  The kids are still home on summer break, so who knows what we have going on with the floor!  It dawned on me how often we waste time cleaning way more than needed, wasting time and energy.  Most of my downstairs floor is wood, so once I got the mop out I could have easily spent a lot of time mopping almost half of the house.  But why should I?  There really wasn’t a problem with the rest of the floor, it was really just concentrated around the sink and refrigerator.  So, cleaning just those spots was good enough as an in-between cleaning until I really do need to mop the whole floor.  The kids are still home and the swimming pool is still up in the yard, so it won’t be long before a big cleaning, but until then…

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Recently I worked with a client who has moved into a nice, big home and needed some ideas on how to organize her kitchen.  It’s wonderful to have  a large enough space to move around as well as space to store all your kitchen gadgets and pantry items.  But sometimes having all that space can leave things too spread out, making it difficult to work in your kitchen.  If you are moving into a new home, you can start your kitchen organizing from scratch.  If you are just unhappy with your layout in your current kitchen, then you can still follow these easy steps to organize your kitchen.

1. Go through cupboards and drawers.  Place “like” items together.  Glasses with glasses, spatulas with spatulas, bowls with bowls, etc.  Look at how much you really have.  Can you truly use all that stuff?  Donate the excess and keep it down to what you really need.
2. Be honest with yourself about what you will really still use.  Are you really going to bake bread in a bread machine?  Really going to flip pancakes on a griddle?  Really going to make fresh juice?  If not, pass gadgets on-make someone’s day!
3. Place items together as close to where you will use them as possible.  Do you like to bake?  Then create a baking station, place all your baking items together so you aren’t running all around the kitchen gathering supplies.
4. If you make school/work lunches, place all your plastic bags, lunch sacks and snacks together, again so you aren’t zigzagging around the kitchen.

Organizing your kitchen is worth it to make the task of making meals and baking just that much easier!

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You can get organized and still be conscientious of your impact on the environment by using bamboo products.

I did a little research, and here are some of the facts I found out about bamboo:

• One bamboo clump can produce 200 poles in the five years it takes one tree to reach maturity.
• Bamboo is a critical element in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on the planet.
• Bamboo grows one third faster than the fastest growing tree.
• Bamboo can be harvested in 3-5 years versus 10-50 for most softwoods and hardwoods.

Check out the bamboo kitchen drawer organizer above as a great option to store your silverware and other kitchen gadgets.  Before you load it up, be sure to:

1. Weed out anything you no longer use.
2. If you have muliples, put them together and then “choose the best, get rid of the rest.”

Green home organization in the kitchen is easy, accessible and affordable!

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Turntables or Lazy Susan’s are great to use in the pantry!  For their use, think outside of spices.  Of course you can use them to hold spices, I actually use 2 in my own pantry for spices.  The downside is the spices are not in alphabetical order but I don’t have a problem with that.  I still know right where to go and just give it a spin to find what I need.  Other ways you can use turntables:

• Keep together items like peanut butter, syrup & honey
• Keep together oils and vinegars
• Store flavored syrups for coffee, sugar and cream
• You can even use larger turntables and place coffee mugs or vases on them

Turntables come in a variety of sizes depending on what your needs are from 10″-18″.  Organizing your pantry with turntables makes it easier to access what you need without things getting lost behind each other. 

Pantry organizing with turntables is quick and easy!

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