Easy Kitchen Organization Hacks You’ll Love

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!

This past weekend my Junior Girl Scout completed her Simple Meals badge. One of the requirements for this 21st-century version of the Cooking badge was to tour a kitchen with a knowledgeable adult. Since she’s already spent a lot of time helping out in the kitchen, I had HER give ME a tour. She correctly identified what belongs where throughout the kitchen. But I quickly realized that she took for granted all of the kitchen organization hacks we’ve implemented over time to make this center-of-our-home more functional.

Lucky her, she gets to take these things for granted! A functional, well-organized kitchen is so much nicer to spend time in than one that’s not well-set-up. Having a workable kitchen is a must if you’re going to save money and keep your family healthy by cooking meals from scratch at home, rather than relying on processed foods and takeout for the bulk of your meals.

But even if the layout of your kitchen is less-than-ideal, there are things you can do to make it more functional and well-organized. Best of all, many of my favorite kitchen organizational hacks cost little to nothing to set up!

So take a peek at some of my favorite kitchen organization hacks and see if one or more might help make your kitchen work better for you!

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!

Our Favorite Kitchen Organization Hacks

1. Double your storage with shelf risers

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!
White shelf riser on lower level, but see also the black ones on top of the wooden half-shelf

When we bought our current home almost a decade ago, we soon realized that our deep cupboards came with only half-shelves inside. On many levels, this works well. But on others, it’s a recipe for disaster.

So one of the first things we did was add some shelf risers. This makes it easier to keep (for example) the baking sheets on the very top of this photo accessible, but still leave room for the lids that are underneath them. We use the lids less often than the baking sheets, but without that riser, we’d constantly have to be digging the baking sheets out from UNDER the lids. Or else, have everything come crashing down on us all the time, if we tried to balance the baking sheets on top.

If you’ve never purchased shelf risers, they’re generally inexpensive and easy to find; try thrift stores if you want to save even more on them. In our case, we already had a bunch from our previous homes, so were able to repurpose them into our current home.


Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!2. Or with under-shelf baskets

We had a similar problem with lids in our upper cupboards, until I found this hanging under-shelf basket at a thrift store. It keeps the lids contained, so they don’t slide all over the place. It also keeps them separate from the baking dishes underneath, so it’s easier to grab one or the other without having to take everything out.

Hanging under-shelf baskets are a little harder to find than shelf risers, but kitchen and storage stores often carry them (or you can buy them online, of course). I’ve found most of mine at thrift stores.


3. Limit food containers, and make sure they stack

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!Do you have a problem with what my husband calls RPC (Random Plastic Crap)? Laugh if you want, but this was one of the first kitchen challenges we had to overcome in our marriage: the merging of the RPC. We each had our favorite containers for toting our lunches to work, storing leftovers in the refrigerator, and freezing excess food for future use.

But as we quickly learned, having too many types of containers cluttering the cupboard makes a mess. It also slows you down when you’re trying to find a matching lid, for example.

So I streamlined our container collection to just a few types of containers. Each set is stacked directly in front of a flat sandwich box that holds the corresponding lids, standing up on end. All the odd pieces, I matched up with their lids and then donated to thrift stores.

Now, not only is our cupboard neater, but everything stacks better in the refrigerator and freezer, too.

4. Hang it up

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!Did you ever watch Julia Child’s cooking shows? My husband and I both spent time watching them on public TV while growing up. And as soon as we bought our current house, he began talking about setting up a pegboard to hang our larger skillets on, like Julia had.

I was skeptical at first, but have grown to love this pegboard that takes up a wall across from our appliances and island. It now provides hooks not only for pots and pans, but also for the girls’ jackets, schoolbags, lunch boxes, water bottles, headbands, hair clips, and hair ties. All those things we want to have easy access to on busy school mornings, but don’t want cluttering up a horizontal surface or taking up drawer space.

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!Notice (just below the black pan) that we also have a rack for some of our pot lids hanging on the wall. This is a genius solution that takes up almost no space. My in-laws have one hanging in a space only a few inches wide between their refrigerator and the wall, and it saves them precious cabinet space to have those lids stored vertically, out of the way.

Even a few extra hooks here and there can help. Consider hooks under a cabinet to store your coffee mugs, freeing up cupboard space. Or a fruit basket hanging from the ceiling. My personal must-have extra hook is the 3M Command hook I hung on the side of my husband’s espresso maker to hold our two tiny cutting boards. I use those boards every morning, right in that spot, to prep the girls’ breakfasts and lunches. Having them right there makes my life so much easier.


5. Need more storage or counter space? Add some!

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!There’s no reason to let a poor floor design or insufficient cabinet space stop you from having a functional kitchen:

  • Instead of having barstools at our overhang counter, we’ve added a long, low bookcase to hold our cookbook collection.
  • Need more cabinet space? Look for a hutch at a flea market or secondhand furniture store. Ours is an antique that I bought secondhand at a flea market and refinished.
  • Or check out your nearest Habitat Restore for odd pieces of cabinetry that complement your existing decor. As I recently wrote elsewhere, I scored two like-new cabinets for the girls’ homework station at our nearest Restore for a total of $20. Never installed your own cabinets before? There are plenty of DIY guides online – for example, here, here, and here.
  • Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!
    A neighbor’s curb as I was drafting this post, I kid you not. In other words, you could even score a free cart or table on Trash Day, at your local landfill’s “Free Store,” or from Freecycle.org.

    For more counter space, consider adding a table (and risers, if needed to get it to a comfortable work height). Several apartments ago, a tall wooden table (secondhand, $15) added crucial work space to my kitchen. A few apartments later, I bought a lightweight 8-foot folding table from Costco for the same purpose, and added bed risers to make it a comfortable work-height. Though they’re no longer in my kitchen, I still have and use them both as workspace elsewhere in our home.

  • If you need more storage AND more workspace, consider adding a large rolling cart, butcher’s block, or kitchen workstation,. If not for the island that our new house came with, we totally would have done this.

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!6. Don’t overlook otherwise “wasted” space

Just like the shelf risers and under-shelf baskets, or that unused hunk of wall, there’s always space to add a shelf or hook to make your life easier. As I’ve noted before, high spaces are a great place to tuck extra shelves. Or maybe a little shelf under the edge of your counter would make sense, like this shelf I installed awhile back for my morning oatmeal supplies. They are still at hand this way, but otherwise out of sight and off the countertop.

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!
Our pantry cupboard with its four-inch-deep door shelves.

And what about those things that are just plain hard to store? See if you can find a small place to tuck them where they’re easy to get at, but out of the way. For example, our step stool lives in the three-inch-wide space between our refrigerator and our pantry cupboard. My husband’s pizza stone lives underneath the hutch. Some inside-the-door racks under our sink corral extra cleaning supplies. And our little electric broom, aka the vacuum my girls most often use to clean up their messes, lives in a small space between our hutch and the wall.

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!The space inside your cupboard doors is an often-overlooked space where you can squeeze in extra storage without too much difficulty. When we bought this house, the large main door of our pantry cupboard surrounding the refrigerator had a four-inch-deep door unit with adjustable shelves. But the three top cupboards did not.

So I had my husband build a similar unit for inside the door over the main pantry cupboard. And I acquired three Ikea spice racks from thrift stores and online, stained them to match our cupboards, then installed them inside the cabinets over the refrigerator. Boom! – tons of extra storage space that was otherwise being wasted.


6. Clear containers make it easy to find things

There’s a reason why our leftovers containers (see #3, above) are clear: this decreases the chances that our leftovers will get lost in the fridge. Since we like to cook healthy foods from scratch, we also have a lot of whole grains, nuts, dried fruits, etc. around the house. Whenever possible, we store these in clear containers so it’s easy to see what is where. (For the grains, I’ve also labeled the jars for easy reference.)

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!
Our nuts and dried fruits’ matching containers from the bulk foods section (standing on their sides).

Yes, you COULD spend a lot of money on matching clear containers. But you don’t have to:

  • Our nuts, dried fruits, etc. on the top two shelves of the pantry-cupboard door are in bulk food containers from our local grocery store. We buy refills of many of these (raisins, walnuts, almonds, etc.) in bulk from Costco or at wholesale, and refill the smaller containers on the door as needed.
  • Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!Our grains and the like are in clear glass and plastic containers, many of which are displayed in our hutch. Some of them are the canisters the products came in (or similar products came in) from the store. Others are from thrift stores and yard sales. The smaller ones are recycled glass condiment jars.
  • And I’m particularly fond of a certain brand of dry-roasted salted peanut not only because we think they are yummy, but because their 16-oz jars are wrapped in cellophane sleeves that are easy to remove. Thus I can easily repurpose the jars as storage containers for snacks, instant coffee (which my mama prefers to brewing coffee when she visits), etc.

7. So do labels

Can’t tell your cornmeal from your polenta at first glance? Or your basmati rice from your jasmine from your long-grain white rice? (Thanks to my hubby, we have all five of these, and he uses all five on a semi-regular basis in his cooking.)

Labeling things is such a simple step and only takes a few minutes, but makes it a LOT easier to tell what’s what – especially for, say, little helpers or guests who are unfamiliar with your kitchen.

Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!Labeling can also help you more easily store things in spaces that otherwise wouldn’t work. For example, our large collection of spices lives, roughly alphabetized, in a drawer. Labeling the lids was an essential first step to making this a workable system. The spices take up less space in this deep drawer than they would anywhere else in the house, but they’re all easily accessible.

When we first set these systems up, I just used sticky labels and a pen or marker. But since then, I’ve acquired my Brother P-Touch label maker. My mama insisted that I needed one of these in my life, so gave me one for Christmas a few years ago. I was skeptical until I tried it. It’s been great for labeling everything from the girls’ school supplies to their camping gear. So if I ever felt like redoing all these systems, I’d be using my label-maker instead.


8. Make your open displays pretty AND functional

Most of our kitchen has soffits connecting the cabinet tops to the ceilings. This annoys me, because you can’t store/display things up there. So I’ve made use of the space I have as best I can:Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!

  • Besides the jars of grains out on the middle shelf of our hutch, I’ve stored a few extra supplies and our spare jars on the top of the hutch. That way, they’re easy to find if I need them, but otherwise serving a decorative function, too.
  • Does your kitchen work for you as well as it could? These budget-friendly kitchen organization hacks have revolutionized our kitchen; give them a try!
    One of our decorative baskets, here over the stove.

    Likewise, I’ve grouped some jars and containers that are too big to fit anywhere else on top of the girls’ homework station cabinets.

  • On some of the soffits around the kitchen, I’ve hung star- and heart-shaped baskets I found at thrift stores. Most days of the year, they hang there as decoration. But when we’re entertaining, I take them down and put them to use.

9. Use magnets

Magnets are useful for so much more than tacking things to your refrigerator:

  • We always keep at least one magnet on the vent over the stovetop, to keep printed recipe cards at eye level and easy to find when we’re cooking.
  • In the summer, the exterior door on one end of the kitchen has a large magnetic hook on it. The hook holds a woven hanging basket (another thrift-store find!) with bug repellent and sunblock. The basket lives on the door partly as a reminder to the girls to put them on before heading outside, partly so they’re always handy. (In the winter, the same basket holds everyone’s mittens and gloves.)
  • Although we use a wooden knife block instead, many people love using magnetic strips to store their knives on the wall, out of reach of little ones. We’ve used hanging magnetic strips in the past to hold the girls’ art supplies.


And finally, the kitchen upgrade that has been the biggest investment we’ve made – but worth every penny – is this:

Six of our nine Slide-a-Shelf units; the top three are 3/4 extension, the bottom three are full extension.

10. Reclaim deep cabinets with roll-outs

When Dear Husband and I were hunting for our current house, I fell in love with one house’s kitchen because of the pantry cupboard. Every single shelf had a custom-installed roll-out shelf.

When we instead bought our current home, we were faced with a 30-inch-deep pantry cabinet. Even if you subtract the four-inch-deep shelving unit mounted inside the door, that’s still about two-foot-deep shelves. Deep enough for things to easily get lost in the back, and for the stuff stored in back to be inaccessible unless you take everything in front out.

So the first thing I did was start researching roll-out shelves. I finally settled on Slide-a-Shelf’s custom units. They take 1-2 weeks to arrive from when you order them, and they are not cheap. But they’re sturdy, custom-made to your existing cabinet’s measurements, and worth every penny.

Over time, we’ve installed nine custom Slide-a-Shelf units, all in the pantry cupboard cabinets surrounding our refrigerator. Having these roll-outs has helped us reclaim this otherwise barely-usable storage space. Comparing our use of these deep cupboards before the slide-out shelves to now, it’s like night and day. Things no longer get lost in the back, and everything is within easy reach.

So there you have it – ten easy kitchen organization hacks that can potentially make your space oh-so-much-more functional. Which of these do you already use? And which might give your kitchen a much-needed upgrade? What’s YOUR favorite kitchen organizational hack? Let us know in the comments!

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39 thoughts on “Easy Kitchen Organization Hacks You’ll Love”

  1. Wow! You really made the most out of your space! I’ve worked to narrow down our food containers and that has helped a lot. I use mostly stackable Pyrex now and it saves a TON of space.

    1. Aww, I love the stackable Pyrex! (You don’t see them in these pics because they’re pretty much always in use in the fridge!) Isn’t it amazing what a difference thinning the (in our case) RPC makes?!?

  2. There’s no such thing as a kitchen thats too organized. Mine, on the other hand, certainly has some improvements to be made. I’ll need to put some of your hacks into play.

  3. The best way I keep my kitchen organized is by having less and purging every so often. I definitely do need the under shelf basket organizers for the lids from my containers those would work perfect.

    1. YES! Regular purging is also a help! Or even just going through your cupboards so you know what you HAVE already and don’t overbuy! That has been the biggest thing the slide-out shelves have helped us with! 🙂

  4. Thank you for sharing so many different techniques how to organise your kitchen with images and congrats on your little one getting their badge.

  5. Thank you for providing so many different techniques to organise your kitchen and with images, and congrats for your little one getting her badge ! I was so happy when I earned mine when I was younger

  6. My husband loves stuff on counters. I friggin HATE stuff on counters. But I think he is realizing that stuff on counters look TERRIBLE… And very COLLEGE DORM like – so he has been starting to put appliances away – PRAISE THE WORLD lol!

    1. OMG you are soooooo lucky! He and my hubby sound like peas in a pod. The battle is never-ending – I get the counters cleared (appliances, HAH, we’re talking general clutter ev-ry-where!) and then I turn my back and they are covered again!!!

  7. We have a small kitchen and it’s really difficult to keep it organized. But every 2 months we de-clutter the space and everything is getting better. Useful tips and suggestions.

    1. YES – regular decluttering is a must! Just did another round on the cupboards a month ago – it always helps, so much!

    1. Oh YESSS I know just what you mean! Some of the final steps here came only recently, after putting our kitchen back together after new flooring put in (old flooring got destroyed by flooding earlier this year) – it has taken FOREVER, but I challenge myself to do at least one little thing per day, and that has definitely helped!

  8. random plastic crap! Hahaha! My kitchen is super small so i need useful tips to organize it, i already did some of the things you suggest here.
    nice post!

    xx
    maliblue

  9. This is so helpful and a kick in the pants that I need. Our kitchen has a tiny amount of storage. I’ve actually had the pot accessories that you had pictured in my Amazon cart forever and haven’t ordered them yet, but I need to so badly! Thanks for this!

    1. I was not a fan at first on aesthetic grounds, but it IS so much easier to not have to rummage around hunting for them…

  10. Your pantry is goals! We have been organizing and re-organizing our cabinets and cupboards trying to find the perfect fit and will definitely refer back here for your tips.

  11. Great ideas for an organized kitchen! It makes it so much easier to find what you need when you need it. I really want to do a shelf on the pantry door like you have.

    1. It is one of the handiest things ever! SO great for all those tiny things, bottles of vinegars and sauces, etc!

  12. These are truly some must have. I just move to my new place and I am looking for new ideas on how to arrange everything. This post comes at the right time.

  13. My kitchen is pretty much bursting at the seams. These are great tips for helping declutter and get stuff organized! Love that I can find all this stuff on Amazon too, instead of having to search at stores.

    1. So glad you liked it, Marysa! I find that traffic is just getting worse around us, so I too am shopping online more to save time…

  14. A lot of great tips here. I have been working on organizing my kitchen this month and while I have a pretty good handle on it, I know that I can make more use of a lot of the empty space. I will be working on applying some of these tips in the coming months to really maximize our use of space and to give me more storage space.

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