The Clutter Fairy Weekly #126
Recipe for Success: Organize Your Kitchen for Food, Family, and Fun
In most homes, the kitchen is a center of activity, but all that traffic can lead to confusion and disagreement about how it should be used and what belongs in this critical space. In episode #126 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, examines the problem of kitchen clutter and suggests strategies for streamlining the heart of your home.
For next week’s show, we’d like to hear about your experiences with bathroom clutter. To answer a brief survey, please see Survey: Clutter in the Bathroom.
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The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.
Reclaiming the Kitchen
This week’s assignment is to address kitchen clutter using one of the approaches we talked about in this episode:
- Cultivate a new kitchen habit. Use the Tiny Habits method we’ve discussed before to pair a new habit that you wish to create with an existing successful habit. For example, after you start coffee brewing, unload and put away one rack of clean dishes from the dishwasher.
- A place for everything…just not in the kitchen! Identify an item that keeps finding its way to your kitchen, but doesn’t need to be there. Let it go if you you can, or assign it a new storage location elsewhere in the house.
- Keep only what you use and need. Scan your kitchen counters, cabinets, and drawers for a tool, appliance, or item of cookware that you haven’t used in a long time. Consider whether you have something else that could serve the same function. Can you let the unneeded item go?
For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.
Love your podcasts and YouTube videos. One thing that has kept my kitchen functioning is that I employ the small habit tricks- kinda long but here’s what I made as my habits and keeps my very busy kitchen going:
• I pull out the ingredients of a recipe Before I cook so that my grubby hands don’t make things dirty in the cabinet when I need something – Then in a breaking point in a recipe while things simmer and stew With clean hands I put the items back where they belong
•I also keep a bowl for scraps and trash near by so things can be easily thrown away (I don’t has garbage disposal and I don’t want to touch the trash can )
•I use the lid of the mixing bowls as spoon rest- easy counter cleaning
• I use a spatula to use every bit of what ever I made to serve then wash bowls/pans asap so things don’t get crusty. Makes for easy cleanup.
• remind my self it takes less than 4minutes to clear dishwasher so I make a cup of tea and just empty the dishwasher
• When making dinner or having company I make sure my dishwasher is clear so I can immediately put in the dirty dishes so that clean up is fast and doesn’t have a log jam. And I’m not looking at a mess all evening and then doing dishes late at night. I wash cooking bowls/ pans as I go.
• clear counters during commercials/ tv show pauses the reset.
• keep seasonal items or stuff rarely used in the awkward places to reach.
Stuff I use all the time in easy places to reach.