10 ideas for a clutter-free kitchen

Print this recipe
Your kitchen is probably the most-used room in your house. Everyone in the family congregates in there for some reason or another throughout the day. Because it's a high-traffic area, your kitchen can easily start to feel crowded. Especially if you have a lot of stuff taking up counter space.
So how do you create more room in your kitchen? You could always tear down a wall and replace it with a giant shelving unit. Or, a cheaper option is to get a little creative when it comes to organizing your kitchen. And lucky for you, we just happen to have a few tips to make this happen.
Advertisement
1. Pull-down shelf (h/t Apartment Therapy)
A great way to add a shelf without taking up space needed for something else is to install a pull-down shelf. The best place for this is an opening between cupboards, especially if you have a window there. This way you're not blocking anything when the shelf is down and you can fold the shelf back up against the cupboard when you're finished with it.
2. Pretend pull-out drawers (h/t Everyday Organizing)
Kitchen cupboards are usually the go-to area for storage, which means they fill up quickly. Instead of just shoving things into your cupboards until there's no room left, use plastic storage containers as makeshift pull-out drawers. You can even label each one to keep your items organized and easier to find.
3. Stacking shelves (h/t Organizing Made Fun)
If you feel like you're wasting a lot of vertical cabinet space, install a few stacking shelves. This will give you twice the storage space you initially had and, depending on the height of your cabinets, you can potentially add more shelves.
4. Airtight containers (h/t Honeybear Lane)
Keeping cereal, flour, pasta, sugar and other dry goods in their original containers takes up way more space than you can afford to lose. There's also the chance that they won't stay good for as long if they're not stored properly. An easy way to save space and help your food last longer is to store these items in airtight containers.
5. Plexiglass containers (h/t Shelterness)
Storage space in your refrigerator can also help cut down on clutter, because you can fit more items in your fridge instead of letting them sit around on a counter or in the pantry. Use plexiglass containers in the fridge so you can group certain items together and find them quickly when you need them.
6. Pull-out pantry
If you don't have a designated room within your kitchen for a pantry, you can buy or build a pull-out pantry. This should fit easily in one of the narrow gaps between your kitchen appliances or by a wall and will hold most of the smaller items that would normally be stored in a pantry.
Shutterstock
7. Small-item cubbies (h/t Beneath My Heart)
Smaller kitchen utensils and food items tend to fall behind or get smashed beneath larger things, making them impossible to find and easy to forget. To solve this problem, attach a few small cubbies to an empty wall or the back of a door. Label them to keep track of what belongs in each cubby.
8. Measuring cups storage (h/t LatigoLace / Etsy)
Measuring cups and spoons are fairly small, so you don't think of them as taking up much space. But after you've stacked all of them and shoved them in a cupboard, you'll realize that something else no longer fits in there because of these small items. Start hanging them from the inside of a cupboard door. This frees up shelf space and makes them easier to grab when you're cooking.
9. File folders (h/t Buzzfeed)
Freezers are usually pretty crowded, and there isn't much shelf space in there, to begin with. If you have frozen items that don't stack well or that you need to keep separated, invest in some file folders. You can put them in your freezer horizontally, like makeshift shelves, and store your frozen food in them.
10. Baskets (h/t My Perfect Nest)
If you have open shelving in your kitchen, then you might be looking for a way to store items that you don't necessarily want on full display. To solve that problem, buy a few cute baskets (or decorate some plain ones) and set them on the shelves. You can fill them with whatever utensils, gadgets, or miscellaneous kitchen items you can fit into them.
Advertisement
Print this recipe