Now that my office is more or less done (I still need to hang a few things), I am moving into the kitchen area today. No “before” photos in there, because the problem isn’t that it’s unusable space, it’s the organization that needs to be fixed. My goal here is to make the kitchen more functional, and easier to work in; I’m not worried about decor so much as making the kitchen as functional as possible.

The Backstory

We had this house built in 2021. At that time, the builder wasn’t taking any customizations for any part of the building process, including the lot that the house was built on. We visited the model, Chris fell in love with the kitchen, and I was thrilled he liked anything at all. The salesperson showed us a couple of lots where they were preparing to build the model floorplan so we put in a contract on one of them in July 2021.

The house was ready at the end of November, and we closed on it the Monday after Thanksgiving. We moved into it in early December. We both worked in the retail industry, so our busiest time of year was from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and things were put away in the new house very haphazardly. And trust me, it has not gotten better in the last four years.

The Kitchen Plan

The plan is simple, and has three basic parts:

• Move small appliances out of cabinets
• Make a space for storage containers
• Rearrange items to fit the flow of the space better

While I do love our kitchen, the layout is a little awkward, in my opinion. There is an island between the stove and the sink, making both cooking and cleaning a little more of a chore than it really needs to be. Don’t get me wrong; I love the island. I just think it would have been nice if the sink was a little closer to the stove. But obviously, it wasn’t a dealbreaker for us, so I’m living with it.

Small Appliances

We love to cook, and we are also gadget people, so you can imagine that we have quite a few small appliances. Bread maker, Instant Pot, Crockpot, and a plethora of other small appliances litter our kitchen cabinets like teens at the beach on Spring Break. They are varied, and they are everywhere.

Our kitchen cabinets have one small half shelf in them, which is both infuriating and useless. While all of these shelves are the same size throughout the cabinets, they are either not big enough to be useful, or they are so big it gets in the way of storing larger items like bread makers and Instant Pots. So I’m creating a new storage space for the appliances in the laundry room.

We had a small refrigerator in the laundry room that we have now moved to the garage. It was replaced with a set of plastic shelves that we were using in the garage that I cleaned up to use to store small appliances. It also gives us the added benefit of being smaller than the fridge, and thus feels less crowded.

Storage Containers

Our second challenge is having a place to keep things like Tupperware. I think this will be solved with the change of where we’re keeping small appliances, because that will open up a lot of cabinet storage we haven’t had before. I’m not a fan of our lower cabinets because of the previously mentioned half shelf, and the fact that storage in those cabinets just isn’t optimal for storage containers, but we don’t have a lot of upper cabinets, and the ones we do have are pretty full. I will be moving items around but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to work in anything else in the uppers. We shall see.

Reorganize Items for Flow

The final thing, which is actually a big concern, is the flow of the kitchen. Chris is the type of chef who likes to see everything on the counters, but I prefer for things to be put away in the kitchen. If it was up to Chris, I think he’d have a spot on the counter for prep, and the rest of the countertop would be covered in small appliances. My goal is to reduce some of the clutter on the countertops while improving the flow of the kitchen both for the chef who’s cooking, as well as the person who’s cleaning up. I do not have specific plans here, but I’m thinking through the way we’ve lived and worked in there, and trying to come up with a plan.

Tying it Together

I’m hoping that I can get this done in a week or so, but while I’m working through the reorganization, I will also be getting a jump on Spring cleaning. There is no reason to do the work that needs to be done in there without also taking the opportunity to do some deep cleaning. Major cleaning, like wiping all the shelves as well as the outer surfaces, will take some time, but it will be worth it in the end.