042. Step Inside a Kitchen Organizing Session

I'm taking you with me to a kitchen organizing mini-session today! I just had a recent session with a client to declutter and organize her kitchen, and you'll hear the process I followed, the challenges of the space, and two specific decluttering and organizing tips that I left my client with.

Tune in to have a sneak peek into what a professional organizer does on this mall project!

Listen to Episode 41 to learn all about the Simple Single, and don't forget to take the quiz to find out your Organizing Personality:
https://fireflybridge.com/quiz

Connect with me:

You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
Here's my website: https://fireflybridge.com

Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!

I thought I would describe a decluttering and organizing mini-session today. If you’ve never had an organizer in your home yourself, maybe you’ve watched some of those organizing shows on TV? Well some of what you see is real and representative and, of course, some isn’t.

I very recently did a mini organizing session for a wonderful client who has been working so much that her kitchen had gotten a bit out of control. And she started to feel really cluttered in there.

And first off, it was hard for her to even schedule this session because of her long working hours and how busy she was - and for reference, a mini-session with me is a 4-hour session.

Well, she finally found a light day when she would be working from home. She would have some calls, and would be working in her office while I was there, but she felt she could take a few 10-minute or 15-minute breaks, something like that, to check in with me.

Right, so first off, let me describe her kitchen. It’s a U-shaped kitchen, with a peninsula separating the kitchen from the dining area. It does have upper and lower cabinets, and, being a U-shaped kitchen, it has 2 corners, yeah?
Well the builders of this kitchen put lazy susan turntables in the lower cabinets of those corners, each of those has 2 levels, 2 shelves, and they built upper corner cabinets that open and close diagonally, right? It has a diagonal door. So the interior of those cabinets are triangular, if you can picture that, and they’re pretty deep.

But it’s not a huge kitchen. There are only 4 drawers, and one very narrow drawer right next to the stove.

There is one pantry cabinet, which is pretty good! It’s basically an 8-foot tall cabinet with very deep shelves, nearly 2 feet deep, in fact.

Now my client, and we’ll call her Annie, for her privacy - that’s not her real name - I had asked Annie to send me a few snapshots of her kitchen before the session so I would know what to expect when I arrived.

What I saw in the pictures were cabinets that were very full, but her countertops were relatively clear. So that - when I see that there is clear countertop space, I know that space is not the issue. The cabinets are cluttered from too much stuff, yes, but there is space available in the kitchen because otherwise, the countertops would also be jam-packed with things. And that wasn’t the case here.

So I arrived and got right to work. I asked Annie what she wanted from her kitchen, what her vision was for her kitchen, how she wanted to use it, and she said that she liked to entertain, to have parties, and her immediate goal was that when she opened her cabinets, her things would look pretty, instead of stuffed.
And she said she had no specific wants as to where things were kept in the kitchen, so I knew that I could just use my experience to place things in functional locations for her.

OK so the first order of business was to sort out where food would be kept, versus where everything else would be kept.

So over time, Annie and her family had started just putting packages of food like snacks and things wherever they would fit, wherever was most convenient for them, because the pantry cabinet had become overloaded.

In fact, the cabinet with their daily dishes, it had basically been turned into half dishes and half snacks. And it just wasn’t sustainable that way. I mean, snacks and containers will multiply as soon as you give them space to, and the dishes will get crowded out, so much so that it’s going to become hard to put dishes in and out of the cabinet, and it will be a chore that no-one wants to do, that the family will dread, which is exactly what happened!

So I pulled all the snacks out of that cabinet, and in one of Annie’s 15-minute breaks, she very quickly went through the pantry cabinet and helped me toss the expired things, and the things they won’t eat that they had received over the holidays. And you know how that is: someone gives you a giant batch of cookies, and you eat some, but then there are a hundred other goodies are around, and you forget about the cookies! Anyway, after we got that pantry cabinet cleared out, I started to see how I might put things back in.

But, I wasn’t ready to do that yet, because I needed to see where some of the bigger appliances would go, and if I might need space in the pantry cabinet to keep the crock pot and a couple of other things.

So, afterI took a look at the overall situation, I started with a couple of ideas. Now clearly the pantry cabinet would be the primary food storage, and spices and oils, though, would be kept in cabinets next to the oven, next to the stovetop, which - which is on the wall opposite the pantry cabinet.

Also, she has  both a Keurig and a Nespresso coffee machine on the countertop, and just above those two machines is a really wide double cabinet. So this, I decided, would work well as the cabinet for all their daily dishes, and their mugs and their glasses. On the top shelf of this cabinet, then, I placed the extra coffee pods, and the boxes of teas and that kind of thing, since she keeps a good amount of those things in glass canisters that she loves right next to the coffee machines.
And those deep triangular corner cabinets? Well, Annie loves to collect jarred candles and vases: vases of all kinds, and a lot of them are really tall! In fact, she told me that vases are like accessories to her. So clearly, the vases, all of them had to stay. She really needed to keep all of them. She wanted to keep all of them. And she also wanted to keep all her jarred candles. She loves those things.

Well then, I used one shelf of a deep corner cabinet for a bunch of candles, and then the vases took up 3 entire bottom cabinets, plus the bottom shelf of the pantry cabinet because some of those vases were really tall.

The crock pot did have to go in the pantry cabinet as well. But that was ok, because there were plenty of deep shelves left for all the food: there was one shelf for all the snacks, so all the snacks I took out of the dishes cabinet went onto this shelf, like chips and cookies and that kind of thing one shelf was breakfast things, one was grains and pasta sauces and condiments, and another shelf was canned goods - so you get the idea.

One of the most satisfying things to me was putting the Simple Single in place. If you haven’t listened to episode 41, take a quick listen to that episode later. I explain it all in there. And I’ll link to that episode in the show notes. I tell you exactly what the Simple Single is.

But as I was pulling things out of cabinets, like the medicine cabinet, and the cabinet that had her disposable party supplies, and of course under the sink, but also in a drawer, I found brand new kitchen dish sponges. Annie says that when the cabinet under the sink became too cluttered for her to want to dig through there, you know in a hurry when she just wanted to get the dishes done  and move on, she would be looking for a new kitchen sponge but she couldn’t, you know, bear to get in there  and dig through everything to find one - she thought she had run out because she couldn’t see any - well, then she decided to keep them someplace else, so she bought some new ones, and she’d put them in a drawer, or in the cabinet with the disposables, and then she’d forget where she had put them, and so ordered another pack.

So there were many, many dish sponges, and we had a good chuckle over that! But it felt really good to collect them all into one plastic bin that she had under the sink already. So now, she and her family will always know exactly where to look for a dish sponge, and they’ll always easily know when they’re running low. In that one Simple Single spot under the sink!

OK, do you know how in lazy susan cabinets, sometimes there’s a little bit of space in the back corners of those cabinets, since the lazy susan is round and the cabinet is a rectangle? Well, Annie had placed a couple of vases in those corners. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with that, but she’s going to forget, she’s bound to forget that they’re there! So again, I really believe in the Simple Single, and how this alone will make your organization better! So I moved those random vases and put them together with the other vases in the cabinets.

Now, as I pulled things out, I sorted items into categories, ok, and during her breaks, I asked Annie to go through various piles or sections with me to choose what she wanted to keep, and what she wanted to let go of.

So mugs, plastic water bottles, kitchen gadgets, random drinking glasses, those are bulky things that take a lot of room, and she did a great job of letting go of some of those, and I know she’ll continue filtering through the water bottles that she still has in the kitchen, so more of those will soon be leaving too.

So a lot of people who have those lazy Susan cabinets always want to know what to keep in them, because they’re not really convenient or easy to use.
Well, Annie’s Lazy Susan cabinets, they have wire shelves, so while they’re sturdy, they’re not as sturdy as a regular shelf. So in one cabinet, I put some bulky, lightweight cookware ok? Not really heavy pots and pans, but much lighter weight ones and colanders, that type of thing. And on the top shelf, again, the Simple Single, I put all of her zip-top bags, all the boxes of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, parchment paper, that kind of thing.

In fact, before this, all of those, the baggies and foil and all that, they were in an upper cabinet, and I found about 5 partially-used boxes of sandwich baggies. So I was able to consolidate them down to 2 boxes, and from now on, this will be Annie’s SImple Single place for these, so she’ll always be able to see exactly how many she has left and she won’t overbuy anymore!

In the opposite lazy Susan cabinet, I placed her plastic food containers on the top shelf, and again some bigger lightweight aluminum mixing bowls and things on the bottom shelf.

And guess what: after 4 hours, we weren’t completely done. Now, if her budget had allowed it, I could have brought in a team member and we very likely would have finished the kitchen and we could have moved on to the 2 sideboards in the dining room. But why did it take this amount of time for one person?

Well, sorting takes time. Checking expiration dates on food and medications takes time, especially on things like spice bottles, their tiny little numbers and letters, and boxes of medications. We grabbed a box of medications, the box was white, and the date embossed into them, without ink? It's impossible to see those without taking a picture and enlarging it on my phone, so that takes time.
So I was lucky that Annie made fairly quick decisions about what she wanted to keep and what she wanted to let go of, once she saw the amount of room that she really had in her cabinets.

And as I take things out of the cabinets, I wipe down the shelves before putting things back in, same with the drawers. In most homes, removing things from cabinets and drawers to clean them out is not something that’s done very often. So the corners are pretty dusty. And so all that takes time.

In the end, I did leave Annie with homework. Her job now is to declutter 4 drawers - they’re her everything or junk drawers, if you want to call them that - but there are 4 of them. Now I know they can be consolidated into 2, and the other 2 drawers can be used to better store other things like her kitchen towels, her trivets, and that sort of thing.

There are also 2 cabinets I didn’t get to: one above the fridge, and the other is a small one above the microwave. Typically, people will store things like extra reusable water bottles up there, the ones that they collect, or baking pans that they don’t often use, basically because those cabinets are pretty hard to get to.
And that’s the case with Annie, so she did make me feel better about those, she said she would declutter those very soon. And Annie is also tall, so for her, getting things down from there are not too, too difficult, so I’m very hopeful about those.

I gave her 2 things to keep in her mind constantly as she did her homework and from now on as she organized or decluttered anything else in her house: The Simple Single, and Limit. So the Simple Single will help her sort and place the things in her junk drawers, her everything drawers, and I asked her to remember also the Limit step of the CLEAR5 Framework. So now that we’ve set some limits in her kitchen: the food cabinets are defined, there’s a limit in the bin under the sink for dish sponges, there is a limit to the space for water bottles - well, if her things start to overflow those limits, she and her family have 2 choices: they need to get rid of some things from those categories so they fit, OR, get rid of something else in the kitchen or in their house to make room for more of these.

What this does is it makes you prioritize, right? It makes you pick what you like best, which you’ll choose to keep. That’s a really good skill to develop, and to practice. I’m sure that Annie will do great after I saw how she made decisions the day that we were decluttering? I’m sure she’s gonna do great.

You know what? A few hours after I left, she messaged me with pictures of her progress, and it’s awesome! She says her mom even looked through every cabinet, and she kept saying “very nice” as she checked everything out. So hey! A vote of approval!

Well, that’s a detailed peek into how an organizing mini-session goes, what gets done in four hours. Notice that I didn’t use any new products at all in this kitchen! This was simply a declutter and organize session. We used things she already had in her house. But I did leave her with ideas for products she could get to make things work a little better. She could use a tray or 2 for the everything drawers just to keep them from getting muddled up again in there. And those deep pantry cabinets definitely need deep bins to store everything so the stuff in the back doesn’t get lost or forgotten! But that’s about all that’s really needed for this kitchen! It’s good for her budget, and it’s good for the planet.

Oh, and by the way, the things that Annie is getting rid of? She boxed them up that same day to place on her Buy Nothing group, and anything that isn’t claimed by the weekend, she’s going to take to Goodwill. So she has a plan to get them out of her home within a very limited amount of time so they’re not cluttering up her entryway or anything.

So I hope you enjoyed coming with me on this mini-session, practically you were there!

And if you want to know how you can best get started organizing so you can have great results in an amount of time that works for you, within your own budget, then take our quick quiz to find out your Organizing Personality, ok? You can find it at fireflybridge.com/quiz - easy to remember.

Enjoy your week, and I’ll see you on the next episode!