Adventures in Kitchen Organizing: Zoning

How much time in our lives do we spend in the kitchen?  According to one study, you spend 3-4 years in your kitchen depending on your age and (sadly) gender.  For a few of us, we are only in long enough to grab our leftovers from the microwave but for some people, the kitchen is their oasis.  The place that they invent, create and conjure.  Their kitchen can be their creative outlet and the very place that they feel the most at home.  For someone like Sophia who is continuously working on jewels for her blog NY Foodgasm, the kitchen is the most important room in her house.  Which means it absolutely, 100%, needs to function properly.

In the last post, Sophia and I worked on removing everything from her cabinets and negotiated what she was going to keep and what would be donated to a deserving home.  These few steps took a good three hours but were vital to the overall process.  That was the manual, time consuming and mentally taxing part.  Now we just needed to put everything back in the right spot.  But how and where?

Our next step was to make sure that the kitchen had proper flow.  You don't want to walk back and forth across the kitchen each time you need an ingredient for dinner or each time you need to put away a dish.  In the book, Organizing from the Inside Out the author Julie Morgenstern talks about zoning your kitchen.  You create zones to make the process of using your kitchen as efficient and easy as possible.  The basic concept is that you take a focal point of your kitchen such as your stove, food prep area (the longest stretch of counter space in your kitchen) or sink/dish washer and organize the cabinets around these areas based on what you use in these zones.  For example, all flours, sugars, knives, etc would be near your food prep zone.

Still confused?  Let's check out some more examples with before and after photos:

After

Before

Zone of the Kitchen: Daily Dishes/Food Serving
Why it Didn't Work: This was a very large cabinet that, because of the depth of the space, items were easily lost and forgotten if they weren't right up front.
Rationale for Placement: Since the cabinet is across the room from the stove and not directly next to the sink and dish washer, we used it for Sophia's formal dishes.  They were perfect for this cabinet because she only needs the dishes for special occasions and since the dishes are in uniform sets, she knows exactly what is in the cabinet.  Additionally, the heavy plates were previous placed on a high shelf and they were making the shelf bow under their weight.  They needed more support.

Before

After

Zone of the Kitchen: Daily Dishes
Why it Didn't Work: This cabinet is right above the dishwasher so it is prime real estate for daily dishes (versus formal dishes that were previously discussed).  This is one of the larger cabinets in the kitchen that wasn't being properly utilized when it was filled with an abundance of coffee mugs and tea.  Sophia and her husband are barely drinking coffee this days.
Rationale for Placement: The closer you place your dishes next to your sink or dishwasher, the easier it is to put away your clean dishes.  We placed all of Sophia everyday dishes in this cabinet for quick and easy access.

After

Before

Zone of the Kitchen: Daily Cooking
Why it Didn't Work: The contents in this cabinet were properly zoned next to the stove but there was just too much stuff in one cabinet for Sophia to be able to easily access everything.
Rationale for Placement: Your Daily Cooking zone in your kitchen should be the area around your oven and stovetop.  It was much easier to organize this cabinet after we had gotten rid of items Sophia didn't need anymore and grouped cooking items together by shape. Never try to organize without purging first. It's a waste of time and space.

Before

After

Zone of the Kitchen: Food Storage
Why it Didn't Work: You are much less likely to use something if it is stacked under or behind something else.  Plus, these towers of pint glasses were a structural disaster waiting to happen.   Which I inadvertently proved when I knocked over a glass while removing them from the cabinet. There were simply too many items in one cabinet.
Rationale for Placement: The food storage containers were placed in this cabinet because of its location between the stove and the refrigerator.  Cleaning up and packing up extra food after cooking would be a breeze with the food storage containers an arms length away.

Zone of the Kitchen: Food Preparation/Daily Dishes
Why it Didn't Work: This had become Sophia's cooking utensil crap drawer.  She didn't know what had made its way into the drawer and told me that she once cut her hand on a misplaced knife while rooting around in the drawer.
Rationale for Placement: Before starting the de-cluttering  process, Sophia had three drawers dedicated to cooking utensils.  Once everything was out in the open, we discovered a lot of duplicates (how does one acquire four peelers?) and utensils in need of an upgrade (sorry old oil brush, off you go!).  When we freed up this empty drawer we were able to move Sophia's food wraps, that were previously living under the kitchen sink with the cleaning products.  This drawer wasn't as close to the Food Prep area as we would have liked but space that is more visible and easier to access is always a major improvement!

 

Zone of the Kitchen: Daily Dishes
Why it Didn't Work: Two words, horizontal folding.  Before, there were too many dish towels in one drawer and you couldn't see what was in the drawer beyond the first couple towels.  Which means Sophia was using the same three towels over and over again.
Rationale for Placement: By having the towels stacked horizontally, Sophia wasn't able to see or use everything in the drawer.  We got rid of some of the towels and folded them vertical.  We had so much space left over that we stored a few of her mason jars in the drawer to keep the towels upright.

It was a adventurous day with a surprising amount of manual labor, and we still had some minor improvements to make, but by the end of the day that kitchen looked fantastic!  And my favorite part? Sophia was so happy!  I've checked in with her a few times to see how she is doing in the newly organized kitchen and she's said it's great.  Some of her favorite parts are having her dishes above the dishwasher, all the cooking items at her finger tips and not having unnecessary items on the counters, like a random cereal box.  Her one complaint? Getting used to where things have moved.  Hopefully the changes will become a natural part of her routine and having this new and improved kitchen will help Sophia's culinary creations become more about the creation and less about remembering where to find the whisk under all those peelers.

What are your kitchen frustrations?  Do you have an amazing trick to keep your kitchen optimally organizing?  I want to hear every beautiful detail.

Adventures in Kitchen Organizing

There are only so many organizing projects you can do in your own home.  Each individual living space comes with unique challenges, so I've been feeling like I'm missing out on a world of new and exciting chaos by staying local.  Which is why any time my blog would come up with my friends, co-workers or casual accountancies I'd beg for an opportunity to work on projects in their homes pro bono (that is a fancy word for "I don't know what I'm doing so I can't make you pay me").  A few people said they had projects they'd love for me to take a crack at but only one person (so far) actually allowed me into their home.  No offense taken, I don't want you to see my mess either.

It figures that this daring individual would be a fellow blogger and also co-worker at our "day job".  Though calling her a fellow blogger feels a little braggy on my part.  She has a legit blog; I have an online journal that my sister, husband and five friends read.  Sophia runs a popular food and beer blog called NY Foodgasm.  Her blog is delightfully entertaining and does a fantastic job of balancing the line between indulgent and healthy food.  Plus, I love beer and Sophia puts my love to shame.  She respects beer.

Sophia reached out and asked if I'd be interested in helping her get her kitchen in order.  Since she does so much cooking for her blog, she needs the kitchen to have optimal flow.  I wholeheartedly agreed to help and we set a date for me to come over.  I've been immersing myself in organizing and de-cluttering blogs and books lately like I Heart Organizing and Organizing from the Inside Out.  I'm slowly making my way through what feels like endless research and I was pumped to finally put my learning to the test.

I showed up at Sophia's house on a beautiful Saturday afternoon with a notebook, camera and barely contained excitement.  The first day was a consultation.  This was my chance to see her kitchen, take notes, pictures, ask questions and then go home and brainstorm. The interesting thing about Sophia's
house and kitchen is that I wasn't dealing with an unorganized person. She didn't have mountains of crap lying around that simply needed to be put away.  Instead, we were dealing with a trickier problem, an old house.  Her kitchen has some VERY narrow cabinets, random deep pockets of space on her counter, even a cabinet next to her fridge that isn't finished.  No shelves, just a unfinished floor in a dark and slightly ominous space.  Which means it was space she couldn't use.  No good.

It was a great first session.  Sophia was engaged and open to questions and suggestions.  After a couple hours of chatting, we set a date for our regroup and I walked away with ideas bubbling out of my head.  During this first visit I had Sophia tell me what she saw as her areas of frustration, like an over abundance of pint glasses in one cabinet, how to organize all her spices, how to best use the very deep cabinet next to her sink, how to minimize and organize all her various kitchen utensils, etc.

When we met again a few weeks later, I came with a notebook full of pictures and ideas, a shopping list of items I thought Sophia needed for her kitchen and even less contained excitement.  As suggested by one of the organizing books I read recently, we started by pulling EVERYTHING out of the cabinets and putting EVERYTHING on the floor or counters.  We even went around the house and found items like mugs and pint glasses that had found their way into other parts of the house.  The point of this exercise was to truly be able to gauge how much stuff we were dealing with and make sure all 'kitchen' items are in one part of the house.  You may think you only have a few mugs when they are stashed away in your cabinet but wait until they are all sitting out.  All the  sudden you go from a normal person with a normal number of coffee mugs to a coffee mug hoarder.  Here is one of the pictures we took during our "chaos stage".

Once we had everything out in the open, we went through each category of kitchen items and decided what was going to stay and what needed to go.  This was hands down the hardest and most valuable part of the process.  This was Sophia's life, her stuff, her memories and I was telling her to get rid of it.  We took the time to discuss the value and purpose of each item.  Sometimes it was quick and easy but other times, her collection of pint glasses for example, we spent a good amount of time negotiating.  How often do you use this?  Does it hold sentimental value?  Do you have duplicates of the same item that you don't need?  If you can't part with it, can it be stored in the basement for holidays or special occasions? Again, Sophia was a trooper and it got easier.  By the end, she was tossing items in the donation box without a second thought.

By the end of the day, we had worked our way through the entire kitchen and had four boxes of donation items to prove it.  Having all of Sophia's stuff out in the open made it possible to clearly see that she had some how accumulated four peelers and 30 coffee mugs over the years.  It was also much easier for Sophia to trim down on her pint glass collection when she could see each glass that she was keeping and the few she decided to let go.  As described by Marie Kondo in the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (I'm not a general fan of the book but the basic principles are interesting) during the process of removing everything from your cabinets, you are forced to take each item in your hands for a moment and gauge how you truly feel about the item.  Does the item bring you happiness in some way, whether functionally or emotionally?

It may seem excessive to remove everything from your cabinets just to get organized but think about what usually happens when you try to straighten up your house.  You go to a cabinet in your kitchen, start moving things around in the one cabinet, get distracted by one of the other 1,000 things you need to do that day and then you never get beyond that one cabinet.  If everything is out of your cabinets and creating complete chaos in your kitchen, you have no other choice but to clean it up.  The idea is simple but the process can be a little overwhelming.  Don't get discouraged!  If you don't trust that you'll be able to get rid of anything and you are not in a position to hire a professional organizer, find a buddy to be your sounding board.  It can be incredibly helpful to have a impartial perspective on your possessions.

Stay tuned for part two of Sophia's kitchen revamp where we discuss zoning her kitchen with before and after pictures!