Organizing the Kitchen and Dining Room

Your kitchen and dining room can be a bit challenging to keep organized. They both get a lot of traffic on a daily basis. For most of the rooms in the rest of your house you can get away with a once a week cleaning but the kitchen and dining room require a daily cleaning. Often times you’ll find yourself cleaning these two areas more than once. With a little strategy you can keep these areas organized and de-cluttered.  

The first place, and probably most obvious, to start is in the kitchen. You’ll want to check and see what pots, pans and utensils you have. Take an inventory of them all. The easiest way to organize your kitchen is to do it based on functionality. This simply means to keep all your baking items grouped together in one place near the oven. Any items that you would use as preparation equipment should be kept near your work area.

Let’s take a minute and talk about a portable workspace. If you don’t have a lot of room in your kitchen this can be a great investment. Generally these portable workspaces come with storage space built in. You can store it in a closet, corner or the pantry when not using it.

Again if you are lacking in space another great option for your kitchen is a pot rack that hangs from the ceiling. Although these are fairly easy to install it’s imperative that you use the right kind of anchor bolts, if you don’t your pots and pans will come crashing down. Not exactly what you want to have to worry about happening.

Another area that you might find yourself being challenged with is your freezer or pantry if you are space challenged. If you often find yourself with too much of certain items you need to develop a plan when it comes to shopping. A great way to do this is with a master shopping list.

For whatever reason the dining room table seems to be a magnet to clutter, you’ll find everything from school work to magazines/mail, etc thrown on the table. Suddenly when it comes time to sit down and eat you can’t find your table underneath all that clutter. You’ll need to work on retraining your family to not use the dining room table as a catch all spot. You can help solve this problem by having a little basket, on the wall or wherever it’s convenient for you and your family, where mail is to be placed. Immediately throw out junk mail instead of laying it down to look at later.

If you have a sideboard, it can also be a clutter magnet, so decorate it with some nice knickknacks that don’t allow room for clutter to gather.   Large serving dishes can be arranged nicely with flowers in a vase, or other favorite items.

Family meal time is supposed to be a time where families come together to relax and unwind and share their days activities with one another. However, if the area is cluttered and unorganized it will create a stressful environment that isn’t warm, comfortable and relaxing. You don’t want this so it’s important to keep the dining area flutter free and organized. You’ll find that a decluttered and organized area helps create that warm cozy comfortable feeling which will in return help provide you all with some enjoyable family bonding time over a nice meal.