Cut the Clutter in Your Kitchen Drawers
If you are having a hard time decluttering your kitchen drawers, this post is for you!
Best wishes for a successful week! Onward!
I have decided to declutter my house this year. I feel like I have spent the last year cluttering my house thanks to all the time I have spent there. Now it only seems fair to start decluttering as we begin to come out of COVID. I knew not to try to take on the whole house at once, so each month I am tackling a different area. This month it was kitchen drawers.
Decluttering the kitchen drawers actually turned out to be harder than I expected at first. Somehow I thought the kitchen drawers would be the easy place to start. As usual I was wrong – and I had to do some research on line. I bought some new storage pieces to make my decluttering successful. This is what I learned if you feel tempted to declutter too!
Start with a clean slate. Empty all your kitchen utensils—big and small—onto a workable surface. Then, sort through them and ditch any redundant, broken, or otherwise unusable items. This actually felt pretty good. After all, how many cake frosting spatulas do I really need?
My daughter is graduating from the University of Chicago Booth School this spring. Maybe she can use an extra frosting spatula! It isn’t the graduation gift she was hoping for but…. I confess that I kept two peelers for those great days when family is home and helping me make the Christmas potatoes au gratin.
Another way to go about your kitchen utensil purge is to follow professional organizer Amy Bloomer of Let Your Space Bloom. “We have this simple rule that makes sense for most clients. For example, if my client cooks frequently and she hasn’t used a utensil in a year, then we donate it,” says Bloomer. “For clients who don’t cook that often, I’ll use a two-year rule instead.”
Declutter your kitchen drawers by donating any utensils that you are not using. My Sister’s Place and A Wider Circle can use your duplicate utensils to help someone begin a new life.
Once I cleaned out the drawer with the utensils, I started on the knife drawer! Clearly I needed to make a small investment in this project to maintain strong long term results. I also wanted a safer way to store the extra knives that would protect the blades from damage.
Target had the perfect drawer knife block {about $30 on sale} and some plastic drawer organizers. Wayfare had others that were equally attractive. I already have a big Cutco knife block on my countertop, but I have other knives that don’t fit there which I still want to keep. The drawer knife block gave me that extra storage space and forced me to decide which knives to keep and which to discard. I am proud to say that I threw out about ten old knives.
Having decided to christen this drawer – at least in my own mind – the sharp drawer, I collected all the cheese knives and put them in one of the shorter sections of the organizer. The final short section was reserved for peelers and the pizza cutter.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – and my kitchen drawer clutter wasn’t either. I wasn’t able to make a dent in the clutter in an afternoon so I broke it up over several days with 15 or 20 minutes at a time. I didn’t try to create piles of items to donate since it is particularly hard to do that during COVID. I settled for finding things to throw out – the things I had not been using for years – liked the cracked wooden spoon or the old knife with the chipped blade. With those things gone, I can find the things in my drawers that I want to use. I feel good about the small accomplishments – and in this year of dislocation, that is a pretty good thing!
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