No eye candy - Just an organized kitchen

If you are looking for eye candy, this is not your post so you may want to move on. This is about rethinking my kitchen organization and making it work better for us. Not sure if this happens to other people, but usually when I start out in a new kitchen, I put things away according to how I think it will work best for our family but often resort to where things fit the best. I then almost never rethink or reorganize once I realize thinks aren't working. I just live with it. But maybe that's because our previous kitchens were so small they didn't allow for flexibility.

We've been using this kitchen for over 18 months now and things were bothering me. So, I'm taking a new tact and making changes to my organization. This probably means I am going to open the wrong cabinet or drawer for a month but so be it.

First, I tackled the corner cabinet lazy susan where our spices reside (and still do - more on that in a later post), as well as our various storage containers.  Every time I had to find a container, they would fall over or the lid was MIA. So annoying. We use a lot of these containers for left-overs and cut-up fruit. Here's how that shelf looked before. Not pretty.

Of course, this was the reason that I wanted a lot of drawers in my kitchen in the first place. Crawling around on the floor to find a tiny lid is not my idea of fun. So,the best solution was to move this pile of stuff to a drawer. This required clearing space in a full drawer for this stuff. I then moved casserole dishes onto the lazy susan which are perfect here because I can stack them up without issue and there are no small parts to fall off the back of the shelf.

 Here's the pile of homeless plastic containers.

I then moved some seldom used baking stuff to the cabinet next to the stove where the casserole dishes previously lived. Still easily accessible, but remember - I don't bake. I use the glass rectangular Pyrex dishes all the time though so this worked fine.

And here's where the plastic storage containers ended up -

As a side note, I like the RubberMaid type because they are BPA free and the lids snap together. I have four different sizes of containers but all of them take only 2 lids so I don't have the problem of digging around for the right size lid from a pile 10 different sizes. Admittedly, it costs more to buy the pieces individually than in the bigger set but I also get only the pieces that I am going to use.

So, overall, I think everything ended up in easily accessible places, but when I open that bottom drawer to grab a container, I feel soooo much better!

Any kitchen organization projects going on?