My Slightly Organized Kitchen Drawers and Cupboards

Hi everyone! Today I am sharing my "slightly organized" kitchen drawers and cupboards. I am labeling this "slightly organized: because BOY do we have far to go. This is a starting point and I truly hope that one day my drawers and cupboards will be Home Edit worthy but for now at least we know where to find everything!

For now we just have random organizers inside the drawers but I definitely want to create a more uniform look in the future but will be buying items slowly since buying a ton of product does get super pricey. Also, I feel like we filled up this kitchen super fast! We have been in this house for one whole year at this point and when we moved here I felt like we had so much room and now I could use some more space! My mom keeps telling me that everyone feels this way about their home, that there's never enough space but I know our house is on the smaller side so we will have to figure that out one day!

Anyways, let's take a look at what's going on in those kitchen drawers and cupboards and what my plans are for this kitchen in the future.

Here are my first two kitchen drawers. These hold all of our silverware and other kitchen utensils. The silverware organizer is just a cheap one that we picked up from Target back when we first moved into our apartment years ago and it works just fine but I would love one that is lighter and brighter. Also, our silverware is only a few years old but I can see it starting to tarnish. I need to either figure out how to fix that or purchase some new silverware at some point. Anyways let's take a closer look at each of these drawers.

Keep in mind too that our dishwasher was running at this point so some items are missing. I would like to get a slim container to hold all of our chip clips which all just get placed on the side of the silverware. In the back behind the silverware we also need a small container that can hold all the random items that get shoved back there. 

This drawer is full of organizers but also full of a ton of stuff! Tim and I need to go through this drawer together and decide if there are items we can get rid of. When I went through it by myself I identified a lot of items I could get rid of but I never want to get rid of things without checking with Tim since he is the true cook of the house. 

We also have a ton of coozies but I can't bring myself to get rid of some since they came from events we went to. I definitely need to declutter though. After watching Get Organized with The Home Edit on Netflix I feel ashamed that my kitchen doesn't look as pretty as they make others look!

This is our double cabinet that holds some of our food. The rest of our food is on the back of our basement door and on the shelves at the top of our basement stairs. I purged a ton of items in this cabinet right before this picture was taken. We also needed to grocery shop so there isn't a ton in here but honestly I prefer it that way!

This is our appliance cabinet, along with our cutting boards and grilling tools. We have quite a bit and I don't love the look of appliances on the countertops so it's nice that we are able to store them down in this cabinet. 

This is our notorious junk drawer. I don't love the concept of junk drawers, but there is definitely a need to store these types of items. These containers slide around in the drawer and drive me crazy. I need to purchase some museum putty to hold them in place. Add that to the "to buy" list.

This cabinet holds all our Tupperware on the top and our bowls and plates on the bottom two shelves. I love our fiestaware dishes. This is one of the cabinets I feel pretty okay about and there's not much I can do to make it any different!

Our island has two pull out drawers which are great for our pots and pans. I like the way that the top drawer looks with our colanders, pots, and glass trays. It is definitely nice and neat which I appreciate.

The second drawer however.....I'm not sure what to do here. There isn't enough room here for any organizer and we probably have too many pans. Right now it's just a lot of stacking and unstacking items but some day I will find a solution for it!

Also in the island we have three smaller drawers. The top holds some of Sophie's items. We keep smaller treats and some other items in here. 

I am a dish towel hoarder. This drawer is full of dish towels and there are a few molds for dog treats inside there as well. I am not allowed to buy any more dish towels! I always find such cute ones and can't help myself. 

This drawer holds our cling wrap, aluminum wrap, and all our ziplock bags. Honestly we don't use these items all the time so it's nice to have them in a bottom drawer where we don't need to reach for them constantly.

Our corner cabinet holds all of our glasses and mugs. We have far too many for only two humans living in the house. The top shelf looks slightly empty but that's because we had a few in the dishwasher, it is honestly normally full. We definitely don't need anything else in this cabinet!

This next cabinet holds random dishes, measuring cups and mixing bowls. I am in and out of here whenever I'm cooking for the mixing bowls and measuring cups but I honestly don't use any of our serving dishes very often. I love the Disney dishes my college roommate Megan gave us for our wedding but we haven't had much of a chance to use them yet!

Above our microwave we have all our spices. This is fairly organized although I would love to make this look more uniform in the future. I also want to make new labels and have bigger spice jars. 

This little drawer next to our stove just holds our oven mitts. 

We have this little cupboard next to the stove with a super small cabinet door. I just keep a few appliances in here including the blender I use daily.

Above our refrigerator I keep items we don't access every day. Vases are on the left and then on the right we have a ton of water bottles and cups that we received from different events. We could probably go through this cabinet and get rid of quite a bit but that will be a future project.

Lastly, under the kitchen sink! I decluttered this area before taking this picture but I do need to order some products to make this area look a bit nicer. I also plan to put some liner down to brighten this area up. I am thinking about getting some lazy susans for the cleaning products and some containers to hold things like trash bags and sponges. 

So that's a tour of my slightly organized kitchen. I hope that some day my kitchen will be as beautiful as The Home Edit makes kitchens look! I will definitely keep you updated on any updates I make and I plan to get started soon!

Have a great day everyone!

 

Organized Kitchen Drawers

I know we've only been living here a few months but it takes no time at all to have all the kitchen drawers get unorganized! 

When we moved in I didn't do the best job of organizing things and just kind of tossed everything in drawers and cabinets in order to get it out of boxes. I had decided to line the inside of each drawer so I had a good excuse to pull everything out and reorganize it!

My knives and cooking tools were everywhere! I used these teal bottom bins from Target in order to section things off and keep the drawer looking nice. Yes, the teal Kitchenaid tools are my jam! I picked these out for my bridal shower and everything looks so nice together. Can you tell what my favorite color is?

My silverware lives in this silverware container from Target and takes up the majority of the drawer. I kind of just lined everything else up neatly for now.

My plastic wrap, tin foil, and baggies are all neatly lined up in this drawer.

Sophie's treats (and medicine from her hurt shoulder) live in this drawer. We also have a treat container that lives on our counter but this is for smaller treats.

This drawer holds dish towels and extra napkins and plasticware. 

Out junk drawer holds no junk! Everything in here is useful and organized!

This small drawer is the perfect size for our pot holders. 

I love having things organized and although you often have to touch up areas like this in order to keep them organized hopefully I won't have to do a huge overhaul like this for awhile!

Do you have your kitchen drawers organized or are they a total disaster?

Spring Cleaning: The Kitchen

It's time to spring clean the kitchen! So lets get motivated to get this done!

Earlier this week I filmed myself spring cleaning my apartment kitchen which you can see here. It might help give you some motivation to get yours done too, so definitely check it out! 

Here's what I did to get this room squeaky clean...

I cleaned all the dishes that were currently in the sink and then dried them and put them away so all my dishes would be clean. I took my dish drying rack and washed it as well since it can get a little gross. I also took the drying mat and threw it in my laundry pile so that would get super clean as well.

Next I went through each cabinet and drawer and pulled everything out, wiped down the inside and then put everything back inside. I did make sure to only put things back in that we actually use. Since we have very limited space in our kitchen we use pretty much everything that we have. We actually have quite a few kitchen items that aren't stored in our kitchen because we don't have a ton of room.

I made sure to scrub down all of the utensil holders as well. I do have a couple of permanent stains inside some of them and at some point when we move into a house and have a large kitchen I may decide to purchase all brand new matching ones.

With only three big cabinets, two small cabinets (one over the fridge which is kind of inaccessible), and five drawers we don't have a ton of room for kitchen supplies but we make it work.

Since we live in the apartment I am also pretty limited on changes I can make and I would love to one day have white cabinets and a real granite countertop. Right now I can't change any of those things so I will just do my best to keep things clean until then!

All of our spices are kept above the stove and I talked about this transformation in this post and this post. 

There are some stains in this cabinet I also can't seem to get out which is frustrating because I feel like it never looks clean!

I also wiped down the stove and the front of the oven. I also cleaned the microwave and wiped down the counters.

The only things I didn't touch during this particular clean were the fridge/freezer, under the sink cabinets, and the pantry. I am planning on tackling each of these projects separately since each of those can be very overwhelming.

I also did a thorough vacuum of the floor (including behind the fridge!)

When I was done with this clean I was exhausted but very satisfied with how everything turned out!

What spring cleaning projects are you working on this weekend?

Quick Pantry Clean

Good morning everyone!

Today I'm sharing with you a quick project I did on Friday night. I got home from working both jobs and was feeling really motivated so I decided to take everything off my pantry shelves and put everything back in neatly!

I didn't take a proper before picture but if you head over to my youtube channel you can see a quick video of me emptying everything out of the pantry and putting it all back in. I'm still trying to figure out my Canon Rebel and I think I need to order a new memory card because it got full awful quickly! Anyone out there who uses a DSLR camera who has any tips on memory cards and filming HD videos feel free to send them my way!

Anyways, I moved a few things around in the process- our crockpot has been moved onto our blue table in the middle room. It took the place of Tim's popcorn machine he never uses which was sent into the second bedroom to be stored. (It will be great in a man cave someday!) I also put our blender into the second bedroom to be stored- we hardly ever use it but I feel it's one of those kitchen appliances we need to keep.

Here's what each shelf looks like now:

Our top shelf has all of Tim's coffee on the left. I didn't want to toss anything without talking to him first but we will be going through the coffee since I'm pretty sure some of it is old. I also have some tea samples in the center of the shelf. On the right side is our glass pans for baking. Usually our colander sits in front of this but it was dirty when I took this picture.

The second shelf holds baking items like flour and sugar but also holds my teabags for my morning tea and the toaster. We don't have enough room on our counter for all our appliances so I tucked this inside the pantry for easy access. In the back is pancake mix and extra syrup, a container that normally holds cereal and some refill Brita filters.

Our third shelf holds quite a bit. On the left is some hot chocolate supplies while along the back wall lives all of our pasta, rice, beans and other meal supplies. The bin on the right is full of candy and gum from Christmas. I swear this was empty before Christmas!

The bottom shelf holds Tim's pizza stone. On top of it I placed some snack foods and on the right we have all our bread products.

On the floor my pink bin is still working great for holding water bottles and I keep all of our plastic grocery bags on the right side so I can return and recycle them at the grocery store. 

The door shelves stayed pretty much the same. I did check the expiration dates and everything was still good so I kept everything pretty much where it was.

I did throw out a few snack foods that were past their prime but for the most part this is all the same stuff just placed inside the pantry in a neat and organize fashion. Just goes to show you how much of a difference a small tidy can make!

Fridge Bankruptcy

A few weeks ago we had a multi-day power outage in our area which resulted in a lot of spoiled food. Lucky for us we hadn't been shopping recently so we had a few things that spoiled but most of what was in there was alcohol. We started pulling things out of the fridge (and freezer) and then Tim announced he didn't trust any of the condiments anymore. I decided we might as well do a massive cleanup of our fridge and ditch pretty much everything so we decided to claim what I'd like to call Fridge Bankruptcy.

I didn't think to take pictures until we'd already started but as we started pulling stuff out this is what it began to look like:

What's left in there isn't much but Tim thought most of the beer and alcohol was fine as well as tortillas, apples, chocolate, and syrup. We did however have to throw out cheese, chicken, lunch meat, etc...

As I mentioned above Tim decided he didn't trust the condiments anymore which was fair since they were primarily ranch dressing and things of that sort. We decided to just toss everything which left our fridge nice and empty but also super clean!

Here's a pile that we got rid of. I made sure to empty and rinse out any container that could be recycled because that was a lot of glass and plastic!

A whole slew of condiments waiting to be thrown away.

After finishing the fridge I decided to also do a quick clean of our pantry. I tossed anything expired and moved some stuff around to make things appear a bit more organized.

It looks so much better and I'm so glad that I took the time to clean everything out and get organized!

Have you ever had to claim fridge bankruptcy? How much stuff did you lose?

We made the executive decision to not repurchase everything we tossed- we are instead only buying things as we need them. Hopefully this will keep our fridge clean and organized!

Have a great day!

Organized Cookware

Long time no organizing projects! Let's change that today and I'll show you my recent re-organization of my cookware. 

I think we are growing out of our apartment slowly but surely. I'm noticing as we acquire more items we need, our kitchen feels smaller and smaller. I try to declutter and keep our possessions to a minimum as much as possible, but sometimes there are things we need- such as different kinds of cookware and one cupboard wasn't able to hold it neatly anymore.

So I ended up purchasing a pan organizer from Amazon with the idea that it would solve all of my problems.

It's such a simple concept but it truly did make a difference since I was able to use some vertical space to keep these pans.

Pretty good! The only problem is that is only four pans. I ended up moving quite a few of the items that previously lived in this cupboard into other cupboards. There was too much going on in here and it stressed me out every time I needed to grab something!

Here's what ended up staying in here...

I would like to eventually grab a desk organizer to keep my cutting boards organized but I think for now it looks pretty good! It's a much cleaner look and I'm not scared to open those doors anymore!

Here's what found new homes...

My cookie trays, pizza pan and muffin tin went into the drawer under the stove which was completely empty.

My strainer went to the top of the pantry where I just made a little bit of room.

I'm very happy with how this turned out and I think our kitchen will work a lot better for us!

What organizing projects have you completed lately?