Declutter your kitchen this summer

Declutter your kitchen cabinets with top tips from DIY Homefit

In our recent article How to deep clean your kitchen we mentioned the importance of clearing out clutter from your kitchen if you want to get everything really clean and sparkling. When you think about it, hoarding clutter not only fills up your kitchen space but also gives you more stuff to clean! So why do we do it?!

In this article we share a few tips about how to declutter your kitchen. And summer is the ideal time to do that whilst you have the long light evenings to help:

Make a date with decluttering

Decluttering is something that we all put off so it’s a good idea to decide when you are going to do it and stick to it. Think of it as a date with decluttering! Get it in the calendar and set reminders. Otherwise there is a risk it won’t happen.

And once you do get started, it probably won’t be as bad as you feared. Who knows – you may even enjoy it! Just think how good you will feel when your kitchen is completely decluttered, and you have got rid of all the stuff that you didn’t really want or need, but for some reason were still clinging onto.

This means that you can showcase the items that you want to keep, and enjoy them all the more because they are not hidden behind or underneath all the other stuff.

Be absolutely ruthless

The aim of decluttering is to clear the decks and make your kitchen a much nicer place to be. So you need to take a deep breath and be determined to make that happen. Unless an item is used regularly, or you love it or it has special sentimental value why keep it? Think of Marie Kondo’s concept that if an item does not “spark joy” you should get rid of it and give someone else the chance to love it.

If it makes the process a bit easier, a helpful idea is to have a “pending” box when decluttering. View this as temporary storage for items you are really not sure about getting rid of. Most things will be pretty straightforward – either yes you are definitely going to keep it, or no, it has got to go. But if you are unsure about something, don’t waste time agonising over it, stick it in the pending box for now. See how you feel about it after a couple of weeks and then make a final decision. 

Get rid of unwanted items as soon as possible

As you declutter, it’s good to move all the items you are definitely getting rid of out of the kitchen. But – equally important – you then need to move them to their next destination as soon as possible. After all, what is the point of a beautifully decluttered kitchen if you have simply moved all the clutter into another room where it will be left to fester!

It does take a bit of time and effort to get rid of things responsibly, but it is worth doing this properly rather than just putting them in the bin or taking them to the tip. A few ideas on how to do this are:

• Give them to a local charity or charity shop;
• Give them away on a free website such as Freecycle;
• Sell them online, for example eBay or Facebook Marketplace
• Sell them locally, for example via ads on noticeboards.

Reorganise your storage space

In parallel with your decluttering, why not do a bit of a reorganisation of your storage space? Rather than put everything back in the same kitchen cabinet or drawer it came out of, think carefully about the best and put everything. Try to make sure that everything is organised in a logical way and that the items you use most regularly are the easiest to reach. 

If you could do with expanding the storage capacity of your kitchen cabinets, take a look at some of DIY Homefit’s kitchen storage solutions. For example, it might be worth taking the opportunity to replace standard shelving with a carousel or pull out basket to enable you to access more space.

As you reorganise your kitchen cabinets and drawers, this will help you decide whether you do want to reclaim any of the items in your pending box, or just get rid of them so that they don’t clutter up your newly organised space.

Stop clutter building up again 

The above tips will certainly help you to declutter your kitchen from what it is now, and set you up well to keep it that way. But it’s very easy for clutter to build up again! So here are five ways to help stop that from happening:

• Now that everything has a place, make sure it goes back into that place when you have finished using it.
• Take a few minutes every evening – perhaps when preparing the evening meal – to sort out any clutter that has accumulated during the day.
• If there is a small kitchen job that needs doing, try to do it as soon as you notice it rather than leaving it till “later”. Later often doesn’t come!
• If you buy something new for your kitchen, try to get rid of something old at the same time so that you don’t start accumulating more stuff.
• Keep a charity box on the go all the time for anything you no longer need or want. Then when a bag comes through the door you can put the items in there to be collected.

We hope that the above tips motivate you to make time to declutter your kitchen this summer and do all that you can to keep it that way. For further inspiration on how good your decluttered kitchen will look, take a browse through DIY Homefit’s gallery of kitchen pictures.

Do visit us again soon for more lifestyle tips from DIY Homefit.