Back to School, Back to the Kitchen: Is Yours Working as Hard as You Are?

School is back in session, and if you’re like most families, you may already be wishing you’d spent a little more time getting organized before the school year started.

Everybody says the kitchen is the heart of the home. It may sound like a cliché, but for the most part, it’s true. The kitchen is one of the pivotal areas for keeping an entire household organized—especially once school starts again and everybody is moving in different directions.

During the year, we tell ourselves, When summer gets here, I’m going to clean out those cabinets. I’m going to organize the pantry. I’m going to get rid of everything we don’t use.

Then suddenly school starts again, and somehow the mystery container from 2022 is still hiding behind the cereal.

The funny thing is that when we think about organization, we sometimes overlook the kitchen because so much of the mess is behind closed doors.

But maybe the problem isn’t that we need to get better at organizing our kitchens.

Maybe we need to get better at designing kitchens that are easier to organize.

If I Designed My Own Kitchen Again, I’d Use More Drawers

In our house, pretty much everybody cooks, and everybody has their favorite pans. As a result, we have quite a collection.

And yes, we actually use most of them.

Keeping all those pots, pans, lids and cooking utensils organized inside traditional base cabinets can be frustrating.

After remodeling kitchens for years and seeing all kinds of cabinet accessories and organizational systems, I’ve come to believe that we may have been doing some of this wrong.

If I were designing our kitchen again today, I would use a lot more drawers.

Traditional base cabinets with doors certainly have their purposes, but big, deep drawers are incredibly efficient. Pull the drawer out and everything comes to you. You can look down and immediately see what’s there.

With a traditional cabinet, whatever gets pushed to the back might disappear for three years.

I know because I’ve done it.

Every once in a while, I’ll decide to organize a cabinet and discover something I didn’t even remember we owned. It makes me wonder how much money all of us waste buying things we already have simply because we can’t find them.

That’s one reason I’m a big fan of deep drawers and pull-out pantry storage. Being able to pull everything into view just makes sense.

Use the Hard-to-Reach Spaces for the Things You Rarely Use

One of my favorite kitchen storage ideas is a large cabinet above the refrigerator.

That’s valuable space, but it doesn’t necessarily need to hold something you use every morning.

In our house, that’s where I’d put things like our two different sizes of Crock-Pots, the blender we hardly ever use, the big stockpots that come out once or twice a year and probably the 50 or so candles my wife has collected, burned for one day and then carefully placed into a cabinet for the rest of eternity.

Every family has those things.

The point is to put your everyday items where they’re easy to reach and use those less-convenient spaces for things you only need occasionally.

Good organization doesn’t necessarily mean owning less. It means knowing where things belong based on how you actually live.

Think About the Process, Not Just the Cabinets

This is something I think gets overlooked when people design kitchens.

Don’t just ask, Where should the trash can go?

Ask, How do we actually clean up after dinner?

Most families scrape their plates, rinse them at the sink and put them into the dishwasher.

So design around that sequence.

Ideally, you have the trash near the sink, the dishwasher beside the sink and usable countertop space above everything. Now you can scrape, rinse and load without walking back and forth across the kitchen.

I like pull-out trash bins beside the sink or even underneath it when the cabinet configuration allows it. The important thing is making sure the container is large enough for your family.

These sound like little decisions, but you repeat those movements thousands of times.

A well-designed kitchen eliminates unnecessary steps.

Why I Like Kitchen Islands

A lot of the houses we work on are traditional homes, and many of their original kitchens were never designed to be gathering places.

They were designed to perform a function.

You went into the kitchen to cook.

Today, the kitchen is completely different. People eat there, drink there, talk there, do homework there and gather there. During the holidays, several people may be working together to prepare a meal.

That’s one reason we’ve seen so many homeowners remove walls between kitchens and dining rooms over the last 10 or 15 years.

When the house allows it, opening those spaces can create an opportunity for an island.

I really like islands because they can solve several problems at once. They create additional countertop space, casual seating and a tremendous amount of storage in space that otherwise might not have been doing much of anything.

They’re also a great place for a microwave.

Microwave/air-fryer combinations have become increasingly popular, and putting one into an island can keep a large appliance off the countertop and out of your main line of sight while still keeping it convenient.

Again, it comes back to designing around how your family actually uses the kitchen.

Organization Is Really About Saving Time

With school starting again, families are back to managing morning routines, packing lunches, making snacks, getting kids out the door, getting them home, figuring out dinner, doing homework and starting all over again the next morning.

Your kitchen can either make that process easier or make it harder.

That’s why I think good kitchen organization is about more than making the cabinets look nice.

It’s about saving time.

If you can see what you have, reach what you need and move naturally through the kitchen, everyday life becomes just a little easier.

And when we’re designing a kitchen for somebody, those are the things I enjoy thinking about.

Not simply, Where will the cabinets go?

But:

How will you actually live in this kitchen?

What do you use every day? What only comes out at Christmas? Where do the kids grab snacks? Where do you make coffee? Where do the pans go? Where does everybody gather?

Those little questions can make the difference between a kitchen that looks great and a kitchen that really works.

As we head into the back-to-school season and, before we know it, the holidays, I’d love to hear your favorite kitchen organization ideas. Leave them in the comments. I’m always interested in seeing what other people are doing and occasionally stealing a good idea for my own kitchen.

All the best,

Birch Bishop
Mariemont Remodeling Co.
Serving Mariemont and the surrounding villages