Organizing Kitchen Cupboards w/ Laura from I’m an Organizing Junkie!

Hi Ladies! 

I have a special guest today! Laura from “I’m an Organizing Junkie” is sharing some very helpful tips on organizing kitchen cabinets! There certainly is a reason why God put Laura in my path I do believe it has everything to do with : Proverbs 27:17 which says “As iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another” – one of my goals this year is to get organized! This does not come naturally to me at all. I am a very “clean” person- but when it comes to those cupboards? Ek! Watch out! (seriously). Thank you so much, Laura for being such a great help! (I may just have to do a before and after shot of my own kitchen! I just know that once it is better organized I will be waaaay more “comfy”.)

She writes:

Some time ago my girlfriend had me over to help her organize her often used kitchen cabinet. To do this it was important that we take into consideration how she uses her space and organize accordingly. We all use our kitchens differently and it’s important that you set it up for what works best for you and not some ideal of what you think you have to live up to.

This is my girlfriend’s cabinet before:

It is her tea/beverage/baking/spices cabinet. She has a very small kitchen with limited cabinet space so she really needed to make the most of every inch possible.

Following my PROCESS steps, we took absolutely everything out of the cabinet. When we could see everything in front of us it was quick and easy to sort “like with like” and when I say that I mean all the tea together, all the spices together and all the baking supplies together. We needed to get a feel for exactly what we were dealing with. It was during this process that I found this basket gone bad as I like to call it way back there in the corner.

Those are just my friend’s overstock spices. To save money she buys the bags of spices and refills her jars as needed. In other words she doesn’t use these bags regularly and yet there they were taking up prime real estate on the first shelf. We went through and consolidated any duplicates but for the most part she just has a lot of spices….and she uses them all…I totally grilled her on it 🙂 So considering that, I suggested we move up to a bigger container so she would no longer have spices spilling out everywhere. My other suggestion was to relocate the extra spices to a higher shelf and just leave the jars of spices that she does use regularly on the bottom shelf.

Next we worked with all the tea boxes. Boxes take up a lot of additional space so we got rid of the boxes and combined all the packaged tea bags into a shallow container. Now when she wants to find a tea to drink she only needs to pull out the one container to look through (this is very similar to my tea station). As my girlfriend drinks quite a bit of tea throughout the day it made sense to create her a beverage station, where it was easily accessible, on the bottom shelf on the left hand side.

I then added a wire shelf on the middle shelf to give us some much needed “extra” space. I love these wire racks. They just make so much sense in kitchen cabinets. You can literally double your storage space. I love wire shelves and use them all over my house.

My girlfriend had all the small baking type stuff (food coloring, sprinkles, muffin liners, icing tubes, extracts, etc) scattered throughout the three shelves. We corralled all of these things into one basket to make it totally efficient for her to just pull out the basket when she’s baking and have everything right there at her fingertips. So great!

As a reminder here is what it looked like before:

And here is what her cabinet looked like when we were finished:

All of the baskets I used were just the inexpensive dollar store variety. I love how many shapes and sizes they come in making them super versatile for a project such as this.

So there you have it, a wonderfully fun way to spend a Saturday night 🙂

How are your cupboards doing? Are they in need of a little makeover?

Laura is a wife and mother to three great kids, lives in Alberta, Canada and is an addict of all things organizing, especially containers. She is addicted to the high that comes with living a life of order and simplicity and is always looking for her next “fix”. She blogs regularly at I’m an Organizing Junkie, and is the author of, Clutter Rehab: 101 Organizing Tips & Tricks to Become an Organization Junkie and Love It!.