These kitchen cabinets look neat on the outside, and charts can help you keep them neat inside, too.
When you organize your kitchen cabinets, half the frustration is knowing they'll be back to their former messiness in no time. By using a system of charts and notecards, you can keep your kitchen cabinets in order. Author Ellen Sandbeck also advises using such a system for elsewhere in the house, such as your garage, bathroom and garden shed. If you have a clear picture of where everything is, you won't need to go crazy digging for things, and everything will stay organized. Picture the charts as a map, with the notecards as the detailed view. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Pull everything out of all of your kitchen cabinets. Combine or throw away what you can, and clean the shelves thoroughly so that when you put things back, you're putting them into clean cabinets.
2. Organize all the things you pulled out according to use. Keep baking supplies together, canned goods together, and so on. If you collect a lot of spices, flavored oils, coffees, or something else, keep all of them together so you can organize them logically.
3. Put the groups of related items back into your clean kitchen cabinets, making sure wherever you put them has enough space for related items to stay together. As you do this, use your pencil and ruler to draw a diagram of each kitchen cabinet on a page in your sketch pad. Label where you are putting each group of items, then block it off with another line in your cabinet chart drawing.
4. Create a filing system using letters and numbers for each cabinet. Label each cabinet with a letter or a number, then label each shelf in the cabinet as well. For example, Cabinet A might have shelves labeled 1, 2, and 3, or Cabinet 1 might have shelves labeled A, B, and C.
5. Use a tabbed notecard for each cabinet, labeled with that cabinet's letter or number. Then make up a notecard for each item that goes in that cabinet as you put it away, writing the cabinet and shelf number where to find the item at the top of the card. For example, an item on your spice shelf might read, "A1, Coriander Seeds."
6. Repeat this process for all remaining items and cabinets. When you are finished, neatly fold each corresponding chart, label the outside of the folded parcel with the cabinet designation, and tuck it into the back of your index card box.
7. Find items in your cabinets by consulting the index card box and charts together; use the charts like a map. You also can direct people, such as visiting relatives, who are not familiar with your kitchen to items they are looking for with this system.
Tags: kitchen cabinets, each cabinet, your kitchen, Cabinet might, Cabinet might have
