5 Small Cost-effective Changes I Made to our Kitchen to Make it More Organized

My thoughts then

Our kitchen is not working for us. It’s fast close to 6 months since we’ve been staying here and our kitchen still looks like a mess. We still have boxes in the kitchen and things without a home which are badly in need or some reorganization. The good news is that we want to change things now, but before we do let me explain to you what my pain points are.

Firstly we don’t have enough counter space.

Because our sink has no drying rack we have to use counter space to dry our dishes after washing them. I jokingly said to my husband that we should perhaps get a dishwasher. But that’s not a real solution because it costs way more and it takes away additional under-cabinet space.

For this problem, we have no proper solution except to dry and store our dishes regularly to avoid them piling up.

The next problem is we don’t have a good place to keep all of our spices and oil.

So they take up a lot of counter space. Which leaves us with no choice but to move the appliances to the window ledge. Yes even just writing that makes me feel like a fraud. How does that even make sense? In my defense, I had bigger things to figure out, and thinking about where best to place the coffee machine when it was doing just fine on the window ledge was totally logical at that time.

The solution here is to install two additional spice shelves on the wall closest to our stove. That way we create counter space and under these shelves will be the home of the appliances. But to make the managing and organization of the appliances easier, we will most likely look for a shelf extender to put our appliances on top of. For the spices, I plan to store them in clear containers that I will label to make knowing what’s inside easier.

Once the appliances have a home, I can send my husband to pack everything away in the basement storage. Our laundry machines are in the kitchen we have to figure out a solution for storing the laundry detergents away from sight and by sight, I mean the window shelf. (again! I know)

Lastly, there is a box in the corner of the kitchen

It has some extra random things like food and some baking tins which I don’t have space for. To be honest, I feel like we have no option but to add another cabinet on the other side of the kitchen. But I really don’t want to do this because our kitchen is small and honestly doesn’t need more things that will consume that space.

My thoughts for now is to add a shelf there which can store some extra things. Overall that’s my plan for now. No aesthetic projects for now, just functionality enhancement which we badly need. Now this is me thinking out loud, and please don’t hold me accountable to this later.

But perhaps we will shiplap on half the opposite wall which is why I really want to keep it empty- Then we can add a wall foldable table with two cute chairs and a gallery wall. We could also add some café curtains and a plant to make it even more homey. I have a good feeling about these dreams and how achievable they are.

My thoughts after implementation

So we managed to make a lot of good progress in the kitchen with organization and the space is slowly starting to look the way it’s supposed to.

Here are the changes we successfully implemented :

1. We used an old wall shelf we had in our previous apartment and simply placed in on top of the counter. This helped to give the toaster and the kettle a home on the bottom shelf. On the middle shelf is the new home of all the spices in labelled bottles. We used a small shelf step organizer and it doesn’t really do the job well but it’s okay.
2. The coffee machine still sits on the window ledge but it looks less cluttered since the toaster and the kettle moved.
3. The laundry detergents have a space under the sink now after I reorganized things under there.
4. I added some café curtains and I can’t believe I waited this long. It feels much more private now and we can still see outside because they’re open on top.
5. Under the counter next to the stove, I added a small kitchen wagon. I love it already and at the moment, I have dry vegetables at the bottom (potatoes, sweet potatoes, onion etc), the middle shelf has some Tupperware and containers and the top shelf has some spices in their original packaging that couldn’t fit on the spice shelf on top of the counter.

And that’s it for now. What do you think about how it’s looking now? We still have a couple of finishing touched to take care of but from where I’m standing, it certainly looks better than before!