Trying to declutter your kitchen can be a massive undertaking. Depending on the size of your kitchen and what kind of things you have in your kitchen, trying to keep everything in a clean and organized state can seem like an exercise in futility.
I’ve lived in places with tiny kitchens and large kitchens. They each present their own unique challenges. Fortunately, there are ways to declutter your kitchen and maintain it, even when everything seems hopeless.
Declutter Your Kitchen Counters
This is the thing you are going to see the most when you look at your kitchen. If your countertops are a cluttered mess, this is going to set the tone for the whole kitchen. So when you declutter your kitchen, start with the counters. This is also where you are likely to be preparing food, so maximizing the space and cleanliness here is an absolute necessity.
Dishes
Start simple. Do you have dirty dishes out on the countertop? Put them in the dishwasher or wash them and put them away. If you’ve got clean dishes out on the counter, put them away. Just that little bit of maintenance can make a big dent in your quest to declutter your kitchen.
Garbage/Trash
Next it’s time to deal with garbage and trash. Perhaps you are lucky and don’t have actual garbage on the counter. However, if your house is like our house, decluttering your kitchen meant getting rid of garbage.
I know it’s not uncommon for us to have trash on the counter. We have young kids and our trash cans are locked behind child-safe locks on cabinets. So when you’ve got kids screaming and you don’t have time, suddenly the garbage ends up on the counter. Do a cursory clean of all those items and throw them away.
Paperwork
For whatever reason people love to keep paperwork in the kitchen. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine. Generally I think it’s because the kitchen tends to be a spot where people land after they get the mail. When you declutter your kitchen, get all the paperwork out of there. It doesn’t belong in the kitchen.
Take a look at the paperwork in your kitchen, if it’s a bill or an actionable item then put it in a spot where you can take action on it outside of the kitchen. If you’ve already got an organizational system in place for paperwork, then use that system for this paperwork.
If not, then take a look at my system for organizing paperwork. For anything that is junk, put it directly in the recycle bin. Get it cleared off the counter. For the purposes of cleaning up paperwork to declutter your kitchen it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Don’t get hung up on setting up an organizational system elsewhere in the house for your paperwork. One job at a time. Just get it out of the kitchen to a spot that is closer to where it belongs.
Small Appliances
Now you’ve gotten the basic maintenance items out of the way. If your kitchen is still cluttered, you may have to look at additional solutions. It can be helpful to declutter your kitchen appliances.
Look at the appliances on your countertop. Most people have several ranging from microwaves to coffee makers. Are there any appliances up there that you absolutely never use? If so, consider finding new spots for them or getting rid of them.
I know in my old apartment I used the toaster approximately twice over the course of 3 years, but it was occupying precious counter space in my tiny kitchen. So I opted to get rid of it and free up that space.
You may also want to declutter your kitchen appliances that only serve a single purpose. For example, our rice cooker would live on our countertop. So would our InstantPot. Since the InstantPot doubles as a rice cooker, we got rid of the rice cooker and just kept the InstantPot, thus freeing up valuable counter space.
Expensive Items
Now you might be asking, what if an item cost a lot? When you declutter your kitchen, don’t get caught up in the cost of items. If you aren’t using them, then you aren’t getting any value out of them.
Space on your countertop has value and you need to decide if the value of losing the counter space is worth more than the value of the item. Maybe things like a KitchenAid Mixer are worth it, but that toaster isn’t.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide the value of that item in reference to the space it takes up. Remember, you don’t necessarily have to completely get rid of the items off your countertop.
Going back to the KitchenAid Mixer, we don’t use it that often, but it does get used every other month or so. We realized that didn’t warrant the amount of space it took up on our counter. So we found a spot in the cupboard to store it when it wasn’t in use.
Misc Items
If you’re like me, we still had a variety of other items on the countertop that were taking up space. For example, we had coffee pods, chopsticks, fruits, and bread. When you declutter your kitchen and see these things you might think “Wait, these things all belong here!” However, it looked messy and cluttered. So, we introduced the container as limits system.
If you’ve read any of my other articles, you’ll know I’m a big fan of the container as limits system. Which is to say, that you put things in a contained spot and if they don’t fit then you get rid of things until they do. In this way, you are letting the container be the enemy.
For example, we put all of the chopsticks in a coffee cup. After all was said and done, we still had 6 pairs of chopsticks. Because we didn’t have room for those last 6 pairs of chopsticks, we got rid of them. They didn’t fit in the container allotted for them, which meant we had more than we needed.
For the coffee pods we got a little jar that was perfect for holding a box of coffee pods that we got from the store. The pods always end up in that jar as soon as we open the box and they are never spreading across the countertop anymore.
For the fruit and veggies and bread, we put a box on the counter that contains them all. We never buy more than will fit in the box and it keeps them contained and from creeping across the counter.
Keep looking around your counters as you declutter your kitchen. Ask yourself, what else is taking up space and cluttering your counters and what can be contained or gotten rid of?
With young kids, their items take up a lot of room. Especially when they were in the bottle phase. We ended up getting a small set of plastic drawers that fit on the counter easily for all of their bottle items.
With that we were able to contain the mess of all the bottle items that were constantly all over the counter and get them in an organized. When we realized we had too many of something, we got rid off it.
Once you have containerized and prioritized the items on your countertop, you should have a pretty decluttered and hopefully decently organized countertop. Now it’s time to tackle the cupboards.
Declutter Your Kitchen Cupboards
Cupboards are a beast of their own. So often we have items in there that we rarely use but still hold onto for various reasons. Again, let the cupboards be containers and act as the limiter to how much space things can take up.
It makes the cupboards the enemy and not your emotions about whether or not you should keep things. For us the big things that seem to always multiple like rabbits are coffee cups, pint glasses, and storage containers.
Glassware
The way I approached this was to think about how many of each of the coffee cups and pint glasses that was the maximum we’d ever really need.
Figuring in that we are a family of 4 and we’d frequently have 2 guests over, we figured that 6 of each was a good amount. Then we saved our favorite 6 of each one and got rid of the rest. This worked out well because this was approximately how much space we had on the shelf for the glassware.
Storage Containers
For the storage containers, these I went through and checked to find out which ones didn’t have lids, which ones were cracked, which ones were oddly shaped and never got used, and which ones I knew I hated because they leaked. Anything that met that criteria, I got rid of.
Then I changed my storage method. My goal was no longer to store the maximum amount of things in there, but to store only useful items in there. So rather than stacking them together, I put lids on each container and then stacked them with the lids on.
This also mitigates the unfortunate side effect of if there is just a little bit of moisture anywhere on the glass containers, they will stick together like concrete.
While this method ultimately took up more room in my cupboard, it’s important to remember that the idea isn’t to fit as many things into the cupboard as possible.
The idea is to declutter it and remove anything that isn’t useful. So by doing this, I forced myself to remove any of the items without lids, the ones I never used, the ones that were chipped, the ones that weren’t microwave safe, etc.
Pots and Pans
When it came to the other cupboards like pots and pans, I did the same thing. I made sure sets were together, then I stacked them so that I had to analyze whether or not I actually wanted them.
That Wok with the broken handle. Gone! Why do I have these glass pots? I never use them and they are ugly. Gone! I kept using the space of the cupboard as my enemy that decided what stays and what goes and I repeated this through every single cupboard until I had much much less stuff.
Declutter Your Kitchen Drawers
Now in the drawers, I had a lot of single purpose items. Some of them were useful (Like the lemon squeezer) other items like the banana slicer I scratched my head and wondered why we even had that.
For anything that we never used that was a single purpose type of item, I got rid of it to free space for other things. Now one thing to remember, when I say single purpose, I am talking about things that have a purpose that could easily be accomplished by other tools in the kitchen.
Going back to the banana slicer, I could easily accomplish the same task with a butter knife, but a set of measuring spoons is also single purpose but it would be difficult and annoying to use other tools in the kitchen to accomplish what those do. So I kept them.
Final Thoughts
Once you’ve gone through all of this, your kitchen should be a lot less cluttered. You will still need to perform regular maintenance on your kitchen to ensure it doesn’t get cluttered again, but now that you’ve gotten rid of all the extraneous items, you shouldn’t need to declutter your kitchen again.
If you struggle to keep your kitchen clean still, I have some handy steps on how to maintain your kitchen. Remember, it’s always easier to keep your kitchen clean if it contains less clutter.