The 3 C’s of The Kitchen Command Center
So, the last blog covered my “organizing roadmap” for my home. Now let’s take a walk in my house to focus on the starting point of my clutter organizing roadmap!
Kitchen—my command center revolves around decisions on food delivery, managing events, and maintaining the finances. The kitchen is where everyone congregates and it must be available for meal planning, entertaining, and coordination of school and kid activities. How to create your kitchen command center.
1. Culinary Operations
Inventory baking, cooking, utensils, pots, and pans, into piles etc.
Donate unused wares (have you used it in the past year?
It was a good idea when you bought it, now not so much.
Throw away pots, pans with scratches that might leak Teflon or other chemicals
Open all the cupboards that hold your kitchen wares
Stare for a bit. Envision the best placement to enhance your kitchen flow—refrigerator—stove top—sink and repeat.
Pantry—What is there to eat?
Inventory & group food stuff by use. For example
Baking ingredients all on 1 shelf
Dried beans, rice, pasta, potatoes
Canned goods, condiments
Open all the food cabinets.
Stare for a bit.
Place frequently used items at eye level or lower.
Group remaining food by category, then by shelves.
Quality snacks at child level
Post menu of the week. (That’s another blog yet to be!)
2. Coordinated Events Calendar
Centrally Placed Family Calendar (usually in the kitchen or on refrigerator)
Large calendar boxes
Magnetic basket for flyers, fundraisers, due dates
Color code by child
3. Curtailing Paper Chaos
When you walk into the house with the mail, where do you place it? Does it stay there for days? Or do you put it on your desk? Is it on a kitchen counter? How often do you get the mail? When do the school flyers, advertisements, magazines, and bills arrive? Where do you put the kids’ artwork after “featured” on the refrigerator?
What is your system to combat paper clutter? Choose from these tried and true solutions.
Buy a small shredder.
Keep it near the placement of all papers listed above
Touch each mail, flyers, advertisements, magazines, bills, artwork etc. once.
Open
File in “bills, school, events etc.” folder/basket
Pin to bulletin board
Hang on refrigerator
Recycle
Shred
This can be your home’s roadmap. Does it still sound overwhelming? Do you feel like you have so many ideas on how to organize your kitchen command center? Or that you can’t decide on which idea to start?
Start with Culinary Operations (What is there to Eat!) or Coordinating the Events Calendar (When is band practice?), or Curtailing that Paper Chaos (What flyer? Mom, What’s a flyer?). Clutter wasn’t made in a day and neither is its demise. Choose a starting place, set a time limit-30 minute-go. See how far you can go on your map.
Here is what one of our clients told us about our service and results. “When I feel out of control and can’t seem to figure out where to begin organizing, I call you. It seems so overwhelming to me and frustrating. But then, you show up. We create a plan and then we start. Soon my mood is changing and I’m seeing results. When we finish what we decided to get done in that session I can finally, breathe.”
SK Out! Have a great week! Be Happy!
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