Parenting Article:

Kitchen Capers - organising your kitchen

By: Rebecca Mezzino

Kitchens can be difficult to keep organised, so please don't be under the false impression that you are the only one who constantly fights with your plasticware!

There are a few rules that I always follow when organising kitchens. I'm going to let you in on them so that maybe it will help you out a little.

1. Too many cookbooks.
   How could you possibly cook all the meals in 50 cookbooks and 100 cooking magazines? You probably don't have that many meals left in your life! Some people keep entire cookbooks for just one recipe. Try writing them out and then donating the rest of the book.  And stop those magazine subscriptions (sorry, Donna Hay!). They come in faster than you can cook their recipes, so save yourself some money, some space, and some sanity! You should be fine with 5-10 magazines and 3-5 cookbooks.
   
   
2. Are you going to use it? Really?
   I recently cleaned out my utensil drawer for the first time in a while and found that I had a punch ladle. That's all well and good, but I don't have a punch bowl! I figured that for the once-every-three-years occasion that warrants a punchbowl I can borrow one from a friend. So out it went! Instead of thinking “Will I use it?”, ask yourself “When exactly will I use it next?”. If you have no idea – it can go!
   
   
3. Group by activity. 
   All of your food preparation stuff should be together and close by your oven, fridge and sink. Storage and serving items also should be grouped together and stored further away from your food preparation zone. Split your plasticware into two categories, Preparation and Storage, and store them accordingly (preparation in your prep zone, storage further away).
   
   
4. Less is more. 
   How many cake tins would you ever use all at once? You couldn't possibly need 5 round tins, 6 loaf ones and 5 muffin trays. And then there are the 27-odd flat baking trays that seem to breed when left alone in the dark! How many do you really use? Be realistic: as much as we would all love to be Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver; simply having lots of stuff won't get us there!
   
   
5. Visualise your perfect kitchen. 
   I recently helped a client who had a lot of storage space in her kitchen, but it was still overloaded. She said to me that she loved cooking in their holiday house kitchen because it just had the basics and she felt a lot lighter in spirit when cooking in there. So I asked her to keep that feeling in mind while we worked. She culled like a champion declutterer! At the end of it, she got that feeling from her kitchen after so long feeling overwhelmed and smothered by it.  Try it and you will understand what she felt. Visualise how you want your kitchen to look and savour the feeling it gives you.  Use that to help you let go of some of your clutter when you are finding it difficult to cull.
   

So by keeping things simple, remembering that more is not necessarily better, and having your goals in mind; organising your kitchen and keeping it that way will be a lot easier than you think!

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