Living areas were first because those are natural gathering areas. Kitchens are almost equally guaranteed to be seen by guests. People wander into the kitchen to help or just to hang out. It’s a fact.
It’s also a fact that the kitchen needs to look clean. Guests want to know their food is coming from a place they can trust. A decluttered kitchen looks cleaner and is easier to keep clean.
Again, let’s work through the steps to tackling an overwhelming mess. Keep the Visibility Rule in mind, starting with visible surfaces first.
STEP 1: TRASH
A bread bag with only a heel. The pasta box that has been empty since last night (or last week) but is still sitting on the counter. Empty boxes of cereal on the breakfast table.
STEP 2: EASY STUFF
Put things away in their established, decision-free homes. Doing easy stuff requires movement but not brain power. In our kitchen there are always random easy things, like an ice chest that’s been sitting in the corner of the kitchen since last summer’s day at the lake. It needs to go to the garage. That’s easy.
The lamp that’s sitting on the breakfast table because it seemed easier to bring it in here from the living room than to change the bulb on the kitchen ceiling fan? That’s easy. Put a new lightbulb in the ceiling fan and move the lamp back to the living room.
Once the obviously easy stuff is done, it’s time to talk about stuff that’s easy but completely unfun.
The kitchen has some unique challenges in the easy stuff step. A lot of the easy stuff in the kitchen is procrasticlutter, and procrasticlutter is procrasticlutter because you don’t love doing it. Irritation over the existence of procrasticlutter can make easy stuff feel like it’s not easy.
Example: dirty dishes. Dirty dishes require an additional step before they get put away. They have to be washed. There’s no decision to make about whether dishes need to be washed, and that makes them easy. Even though stopping this decluttering project to wash dishes feels wrong, do it. There is no way around this.
But here’s a decluttering clue for later that should make you feel better: you like your dirty dishes more than you like the clean ones sitting in the cabinets.
Those dishes are dirty because you chose them. They’re dirty while others are clean because you chose them over the dishes that are sitting in your cabinets.
(If every dish you own is dirty, don’t be discouraged. You just need my other book, How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.)
STEP 3: DUH CLUTTER
As your dishwasher is running or dishes are drying on the counter, look for Duh donations on surfaces and inside cabinets and drawers.
I know. I just went against my own Visibility Rule and it’s only the second room. In the kitchen, multiple items, large and small, get pulled out of and put back into drawers and cabinets every day, so function is everything. Decluttering both visible surfaces and inside closed cabinets is important.
Without pulling everything out, look for obvious clutter that can go straight in the Donate Box. Duhs might be a weird-sized bonus skillet from a set of pots and pans. Maybe it’s the bag of canned goods you put together to donate but then never did. Stick those in the Donate Box.
The goal here, as always, is to reduce the overall volume of stuff. Reducing the volume of stuff reduces the visible scariness of the task and helps you gain momentum in this room.
STEP 4: ASK THE DECLUTTERING QUESTIONS
You’ve cleared the easy stuff. Now it’s time to dig into piles and drawers and cabinets. Start with any piles that exist out in the open, and go through the steps, one mess at a time.
Decluttering Question #1: If I Needed This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?
You’re asking yourself where you’d look first if the counter were clear. (The counter being clear is the goal, right?) Wherever you’d look first, take it there now.
If you hem and haw at decluttering question #1, ask yourself the second decluttering question.
Decluttering Question #2: If I Needed This Item, Would It Ever Occur to Me That I Already Had One?
For example, a garlic press. If you needed to mince garlic, would you search for your garlic press? Or would you smash the garlic with the side of the knife you were using to chop other vegetables?
Would you do this without ever stopping to consider if you have a garlic press?
In the kitchen, question #2 isn’t always a matter of whether I would go out and buy the item; it’s a matter of whether my natural inclination would be to make do with another kitchen tool that has lots of different uses and works perfectly fine for this job too.
The decluttering questions work because they deal with reality only. Not possibilities, potential, or emotion.
What I can’t do is hold a garlic press in my hand and ponder whether it’s a valuable and useful item. Of course it is! But I don’t use it. The decluttering questions work because they deal with reality only. Not possibilities, potential, or emotion.
Yay for simple questions that make decisions simple.
By the time your surfaces (other than the ones where dishes lay drying) are clear and you’ve removed all the stuff you don’t like (or know for a fact you don’t use) from the drawers and cabinets, your dishes will hopefully be dry.
STEP 5: MAKE IT FIT
As you put away clean dishes, the Container Concept will slap you in the face. View your plate shelf as a container. The size of that shelf (or those shelves) determines how many plates you can keep. And they have to fit comfortably. (Comfortably means not squeezed in so tight you have to rearrange the cabinet every time you need a plate.)
Remember: The dishes you just washed are your favorites. You chose them over the dishes that are left in the cabinet. They deserve cabinet space more than the ones sitting in there that you don’t use as often.
Step 5.1: Consolidate
In my kitchen, things are mostly already consolidated. I have a coffee cup shelf and a utensil drawer. But if you’re struggling to accept the limitations of your container, consciously consolidate.
Put pasta pots together. Stack skillets. Put all your saucepans in one place.
If you can’t fit your favorite pasta pot (that you just washed) comfortably in the cabinet, count how many pasta pots you have. Two? Seven? This one is your favorite, so start removing your least favorite(s) until it fits.
If there isn’t room for the two skillets you need to put away, and you truly use both skillets regularly, remove one (or two) more of those pasta pots to make room.
Keep consolidating. Don’t worry, we’re not getting organized. This is still decluttering. Organizing would be pot racks and shelf dividers and such, and we’re not going there. But consolidating is part of decluttering.
Consolidating is a reality check.
I remember exactly what I wore for my school awards assembly back in 1989, but I have absolutely no idea how many pots or pans I have unless I’m looking in my pots-and-pans cabinet.
And if I can’t see one pan because it’s hidden behind another pot, it simply doesn’t exist in my universe.
Consolidating breaks through that mental block for me. To consolidate, I have to actively move things. Consciously look at things. What was a “decent number of skillets” becomes five skillets. The number five (a concrete number as opposed to my totally ambiguous concept of how many I might have) registers in my brain as more than I need. And as that realization hits me, my eyes are opened, and the three I rarely use (and don’t actually like) reveal themselves to me.
Step 5.2: Purge Down to the Limits of the Container
Keep going. Declutter until the things that are left fit comfortably in the space you have and are easily accessible. Leave space to reach in and grab the skillet you need without first having to move your slow cooker out of the way.
THE PANTRY
A kitchen is so much more than pots and pans and silverware. It’s food too. If you don’t have a pantry, use these steps wherever you store your shelf-stable foods or spices.
Step 1: Trash
In the pantry, trash is expired stuff. (If you want to argue about that, wait until the end of this chapter.) Trash is empty boxes and bags, and almost empty boxes and bags with a small amount of stale food in them.
Step 2: Easy Stuff
Like everywhere else, easy stuff in the pantry is the stuff that has an already established home somewhere else in the house. Like a stuffed animal. Or a tube of toothpaste. It happens.
Take these things to their homes.
Step 3: Duh Clutter
Start pulling out Duhs. In the pantry, Duhs are the things you will never eat. It happens to me too. I buy something because it’s such a great deal, or my mom sends me home after Memorial Day with a bag full of cookies and canned goods, and most of it is still sitting in my pantry on the Fourth of July (of the following year). Or I thought for sure I was going to love a new recipe and bought two of something (because there was a buy-one-get-one-free sale), but we hated the recipe, and I’d never use the odd ingredient for anything else.
In an ideal world these things would leave my pantry gradually as I notice they’re there and realize I’ll never use them. But I don’t live in an ideal world. I live in my house. In my house, I need focused decluttering time to deal with these things.
Off to the Donate Box they go.
Step 4: Ask the Decluttering Questions
Work through the two decluttering questions. In the pantry, I like to think I only have things I’d actually look for in there. But asking myself these questions helps me realize that even though I had a moment when I thought the pantry was a great place to stick my tortilla warmer, I wouldn’t actually look for it there.
Step 5: Make It Fit
I always felt sorry for myself over my lack of proper pantry space. By proper, I mean bigger than what I had.
I pouted because I couldn’t fit new groceries into my existing shelves, but I was wrong. Those existing shelves held full-sized boxes with only one cracker inside. Or expired food. Or were just so scattered and whompyjawed that the stuff inside took up twice the room it would need if it were neatly arranged.
If your pantry was crazy before you started this process, my guess is that you now have a lot more available space in there than you thought you would. I assume that removing easy stuff has freed up quite a bit of room.
Step 5.1: Consolidate
Put rice together, pasta together, and jars of sauces together. If there’s a single serving of dried pinto beans in the bottoms of four different bags, combine them into one. Canned goods go in one place, grouped according to what’s in each can.
Remember, consolidating is my reality check. This simple step shows me if I’ve been grabbing one box of angel-hair pasta every time I’ve been to the store for the past two months. Usually, though not always, this realization helps me not grab it the next time.
Step 5.2: Purge Down to the Limits of the Container
Before we focus on getting this purged down to fit the space, do one last reality check. Look around your kitchen (or in the trunk of your car) for any random pantry items that were never put away. Put them away. If your new stuff still won’t fit, let me tell you a secret: it won’t fit.
This is the Container Concept. The size of the pantry space you have is the size of the pantry space you have.
But don’t use the fact that it doesn’t all fit as a reason to start shopping for a new house. Use it as a reason to keep decluttering. If there’s only so much space available for canned goods, that space is full of canned goods, and you have a sack full of canned goods that needs to be put away, use the One-In-One-Out Rule. For every can that needs to go into the pantry, remove a less desirable can to make room.
This motivates me to be realistic. I love red beans and rice, but I make it once a year at the most. I need only two cans to make that one meal. If I bought two cans because I mistakenly thought I didn’t have any, they don’t need to go in the pantry too. I put the older (but not expired) two cans in the Donate Box. Eventually, if I kept them, I would use all four cans. But I don’t have room for four cans.
If I need to put away four cans of peas, but see I already have twelve cans of peas, I learn I tend to pick up peas regularly. Twelve is (more than) enough, so I stick the four oldest (but not expired) cans in the Donate Box.
I don’t have to evaluate the nutritional value of each item; I just have to acknowledge that the size of my cabinet determines how much I can keep in my home at one time.
Maybe I found barbecue sauce in that grocery bag that was sitting on the kitchen floor. I need barbecue sauce, but I don’t have space for it because the pantry is already full.
So I look in the pantry for something I don’t need as badly as I need that barbecue sauce. I find a jar of artichokes. I love artichokes, but I love the ones from the can. The jar? Not so much. Too pickly.
I justified keeping them earlier because I truly might use them someday. But I need a space for barbecue sauce that I’ll definitely use, so I am free to stick the jar of artichokes into the Donate Box. I don’t even feel guilty. I’m not insulting the artichokes. I’m just facing reality. Stuff we will definitely eat deserves shelf space more than stuff we might never eat.
THE FRIDGE
I’m going to divide the fridge into two parts: the inside and the outside.
I’ll devote a few words to the outside: look at each thing hanging on it, throw away anything irrelevant (expired coupons, school notes from last year, and so on), and stick magnets you don’t like in the Donate Box.
Now marvel at how much better your entire kitchen looks since the eyesore you never noticed is no longer an eyesore.
Now, the inside of the fridge. Ugh.
I hate this part, but let’s break it down.
Step 1: Trash
I drag my trash can in front of the fridge and start dumping. Empty jelly jars. A bottle of olives with a single olive in it, sitting next to the new olives. Empty milk jugs. Don’t ask.
Random stuff I wouldn’t eat even if my life depended on eating something. Take out containers. Ziploc bags that hold three leftover tater tots I totally thought I would eat with my lunch the next day, but “the next day” was more than a month ago.
You get the picture, so I’ll move on.
Step 2: Easy Stuff
Stuff that has a home other than the fridge, but for some strange reason is in the fridge, is easy. There’s always something. I usually find hot pads or serving utensils in there.
Unfortunately, reusable containers that need to be emptied of their contents, whether those contents are still identifiable or not, are easy. Cleaning them out isn’t the least bit fun, but there’s no decision to be made.
Step 3: Duh Clutter
This is the “Why Do I Have This?” stuff like the odd-sounding marinade that came in a gift basket last Christmas. It’s the fat-free salad dressing you thought was going to help you lose twelve pounds but turned out to be disgusting.
Step 4: Ask the Decluttering Questions
There may or may not be an opportunity to use the first decluttering question in the fridge, but you have it if you need it.
The second decluttering question, however, is useful: If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one?
With food, this happens to me a lot. I have no idea I already have one in the fridge, so I buy another while I’m at the store. Sometimes this conscious cleaning out will help me remember to use it, but sometimes I have to admit I am never going to eat it. If thinking about this makes your head want to explode, don’t worry. I’ll dive more into the dilemma of food waste soon.
Step 5: Make It Fit
This one is easier in the fridge than in the pantry, because there probably (hopefully) aren’t any groceries waiting to go into the fridge sitting in a bag on the floor. If your fridge is still overfull after the first three steps to working through the mess, contain. Make it fit. Accept that the size of your fridge is the size of your fridge.
When I lived in Thailand, we had a small fridge. It was slightly bigger than the dorm fridges I had in college but significantly smaller than the smallest fridge I’ve had at any other time in my adult life. And the freezer was tiny.
And you know what? My fridge was the size it was. So profound, right? Even after the fiftieth time I’ve said a version of that statement.
I can’t completely compare because I wasn’t feeding a family of five at that time, but we survived. My roommates and I cooked almost every evening at home and kept snacks and breakfast foods in that fridge. Our reality was that we had a small fridge, and we made that reality work.
I remind myself that one of my reasons for thinking I need a humongous fridge is cultural. A giant refrigerator is normal in my part of the world. But the main reason I once thought I needed an even bigger fridge was that I had too much stuff in the one I had.
Step 5.1: Consolidate
Start putting like things together. Again, this will reveal ridiculous multiples that may have escaped your notice when you were pulling out trash and obvious stuff.
It also might free you to get rid of the almost empty ketchup if you realize you have four almost full bottles. You’ll realize you never got rid of that strange-tasting salsa even after you brought home the kind everyone likes.
Step 5.2: Purge Down to the Limits of the Container
Honestly, this step is rarely needed for me when I’m cleaning out (decluttering) my fridge. Getting rid of easy stuff and revealing excessive multiples through consolidating usually leaves lots of space. But if you still need to purge, apply what you’ve learned so far, and get rid of enough stuff that the things left can be accessed easily.
Now your counters and your pantry and your fridge are so much better off than they were when you started. Your kitchen, overall, feels significantly more functional than it did yesterday. Enjoy it. But if certain kitchen-clutter-related questions still plague your soul, don’t skip the next chapter.