Make Your Kitchen More Efficient

If you’re not eating as healthfully as you should be or cooking seems more like a chore than a fun and simple way to provide nourishment for you and your family, your kitchen’s design and organization may be to blame.

I’ve never given much thought to kitchens. My husband is the predominant cook in our household, so my biggest concern when we built our new home and designed our new kitchen was making sure the wallpaper and porcelain tile coordinated with the cabinets and countertops. Two years and one new baby later, I found myself paying for this oversight in planning.

Not surprisingly, as a full-time writer and a new mother with my husband who cooks speaking the first six months of my daughter’s life overseas, I found myself pretty strapped for time, and it didn’t take me long to realize that extreme organization was the answer to a lot of my new mom troubles, including my inability to find time to make healthful meals for myself.

One of my biggest problem areas was the kitchen. It was beautifully decorated, but it just didn’t work in real life. Sure I had all my pots, pans, and cookie sheets in a cabinet next to the oven and stovetop, but they were all piled on top of one another in cavernous cabinets. And even when I wanted to make something as simple as a bowl of soup or a dish of spaghetti, I had to empty half the pantry closet to find the ingredients because they were all piled on top of and behind one another. Often, it just seemed easier to toss a frozen pizza in the oven.

Bottom line: My kitchen was in need of a makeover.

If you can relate to this kind of scenario, you may benefit from a change as well. And it’s not just about saving time; it’s about making it easier to cook with fresh and healthful ingredients, so you won’t be drawn to the simple boxed pizza in the freezer drawer or worse, perhaps, dialing for take-out.

Where Do You Start?

Susan Serra, a certified kitchen designer based on Long Island, New York, and founder of TheKitchenDesigner.org, says you must consider several factors if you want to make your kitchen more organized. “Take a look at what you have stored,” she explains. “Do you need the items you have? Are your cooking and prepping habits centered around how items are stored? And if your cooking utensils and appliances were in an accessible area, would you enjoy using them more?”

Serra says kitchens are increasingly more broken up and divided into work areas. It makes sense, she points out, but you also have to make sure, for example, that a center island used for prepping meals has baking items close at hand and easy to find. “What you want to strive for,” she says, “are accessibility and efficiency.”

Eliminating the Black Hole Cabinets

Most homeowners who haven’t worked with a professional kitchen designer are probably the victims of cavernous cabinets—deep, dark storage spaces you have to practically crawl into to find anything because pots, pans, and lids are stacked 2 feet high with miscellaneous items floating around in deep corners you can’t reach.

Corner cabinets tend to be the worst. While they offer loads of space, the space isn’t easy to use. Once upon a time, the solution was a Lazy Susan. Today, however, troublesome base cabinets can be overcome with rollout shelving that allows the cook to see and easily reach everything stored in the cabinet.

Julie Bishop, a kitchen designer and owner of Builders Source in Englewood, Florida, says she doesn’t recommend using cabinets for storing pots and pans and instead tells clients to use a three-drawer base with deep drawers instead. She also suggests inserting tray dividers into base cabinets for storing baking sheets and serving trays. Leaving them flat takes up valuable storage space.

Other good storage options for base cabinets include rollout trash and recycling bins. “I always create a space for recycle bins,” says Bishop, “because if people don’t have them, they won’t use them.” She typically designs a base cabinet Lazy Susan that holds four bins for trash, plastic, glass, and paper recycling. If recycling is made easy, people are more likely to do it.

Kill the Clutter

While a lack of counter space always plagues a small kitchen, it can plague a larger one as well when a homeowner piles up countertops with toasters, coffee makers, and other small appliances. Appliance garages can help—boxes that fit between the countertop and wall cabinets that can be used to store small appliances and eliminate visual clutter.

Homeowners also tend to be guilty of cluttering up the counter with decorative spice racks. According to Ginny Scott, vice president of organizational learning and development at California Closets, not only do spice racks take up workspace, they expose one’s spices to light, which can cause them to lose their potency over time. She suggests that cooks create spice drawers, where spices can rest on their sides so their names are exposed. “They’ll also stay fresher that way,” says Scott. This is also a great option for soup cans and canned vegetables—placing them in specially designed drawers where they can lay sideways. “Putting cans on their sides in drawers so you can see everything makes cooking easier,” she adds.

In the end, there’s no one right way to organize the kitchen, but there are a lot of storage options that can make your time spent there more enjoyable and more efficient. As Serra points out, “It’s really about knowing yourself and your family’s needs.”

— Deborah R. Huso; photo courtesy of Hansen Kitchen

Making Use of What You’ve Got

Redesigning your kitchen for better storage isn’t always cheap, but it can be a time-saving investment. “Don’t assume because you’ve stored something in some place for 10 years that it works for you,” says Serra. “Recognize what is habit and what is preference.” However, if your budget is tight, you can still make a few simple, virtually cost-free changes in the kitchen can ease mealtime preparation:

• Create open shelving to make all your plates, cups, and glasses visible without opening lots of doors. (It requires a lot of neatness on the part of the cook, however.)

• Keep spices, pots, pans close to meal-prep areas instead of near the stove. Most people use these items when prepping, not when actually cooking or baking.

• Buy some inexpensive drawer separators and flatware organizers to save time when setting the table and trying to find that spatula that’s usually buried in a utensil drawer that rivals the kitchen junk drawer.

• Place seldom-used items like holiday dishware on higher shelves to keep them out of the way of everyday mealtime preparation, and keep a step stool in the kitchen to make reaching items on top shelves quicker.

• Buy inexpensive over-the-door racks to keep pantry items easily displayed, and corral seasoning envelopes and small boxes of baking ingredients into small plastic bins or holders. And get control of the junk drawer with small plastic bins for similar items.

• Store items close to the places they’re used the most. Put glasses near the kitchen water source, whether that’s a sink or the fridge; store plates near the dishwasher; and make sure there is a lot of counter space close to the refrigerator for unloading groceries.

• If you’ve got little ones always begging for snacks, place some pull-out wicker baskets full of healthful treats like apples, bananas, and granola bars on the bottom shelves of base cabinets to make them easy to reach.