“The kitchen is the castle. This is where we spend our happiest moments and find the joy of being family.” – Mario Batali
There is something entirely refreshing and life-giving about a clean, uncluttered kitchen counter. In fact, it is one of my favorite benefits of minimalist living. It sets the tone and culture for the home. It communicates calm and order. It promotes opportunity and possibility (who enjoys cooking in a cluttered kitchen?). It saves time and promotes cleanliness.
Yet kitchen counter organization is one of the most difficult things to get started with. There are, of course, several reasons maintaining a minimalist kitchen is so hard:
- The kitchen is hard-wired as a natural gathering place for the family.
- The kitchen is physically located in a high traffic area of the home.
- The purpose of the room requires messes to be made during its use.
- The kitchen is often used as a collection area for various odds and ends (mail, etc.).
While kitchen counter organization is difficult, it is completely achievable. We have made it an important feature of our house and you can accomplish it in yours as well.
Decluttering Tips For Keeping Your Kitchen Counter Organized:
1. Remove the unnecessary.
One of the biggest causes of clutter in our homes is our tendency to put too much stuff in too little of a space. When we do, it becomes difficult to store things, find things, and access them. As a result, we dread putting things away and it becomes convenient to leave things on the counter.
Typically, the kitchen is full of this clutter. We have cupboards and shelves and drawers full of cooking utensils, gadgets, things we thought we needed, and items we purchased for one-time use.
If keeping your kitchen counters uncluttered is a problem in your home, this is the most important step you can take. Remove completely any item you no longer use. And store items used less than 3 times/year elsewhere.
2. Relocate anything that does not belong.
Kitchens are notorious for becoming collection areas for all various odds and ends. Unintentionally, they become the storing place for many of them: mail, kids’ homework, purses, keys, almost everything in your junk drawer.
Identify a new proper home for each. Then, change the culture in your home that allows them to stay there. Think of your kitchen as a Department Store Customer Service Area – items may enter there, but rarely stay. You can also extend this thinking to items you already store in your kitchen: televisions, radios, telephone books, etc.
3. Give every item a proper home.
One of the most essential steps in organizing and keeping a home clutter-free is to find a proper home for every item. Designate drawers for silverware and cookware; cupboards for plates, containers, and small appliances; and closets/shelves for food and larger, less-used appliances. After taking steps #1 and #2, you’ll find this easier than you think.
4. Store daily use appliances out of sight.
If your counters are routinely cluttered, there is a good chance you are storing many daily-use items there (toasters, coffee makers, teapots, can openers, spice racks, etc.).They are often stored on countertops for convenience’s sake.
But in reality, these items spend far more time as clutter than they do as needed instruments for food preparation. For example, if you make toast every morning for breakfast, it’ll take roughly 3 minutes to toast your bread. After that, the toaster will sit unused for the next 23 hours and 57 minutes. You use it far less than you think you do.
Rather than allowing these appliances to take up counter space and cause distraction, find a home in an easily-accessed area. In our current home, we store the toaster, coffee-maker, and teapot in a cupboard right next to the outlet. In our previous home, they were stored in an appliance garage.
5. Change your “counter is convenient” mentality.
The fallacy of convenience is a big reason our kitchen counters stay cluttered. We tend to keep things in plain sight because we believe it makes our kitchen more convenient. As a result, our counters fill up with baking ingredients, knife racks, cutting boards, and coffee mugs.
And while it may be more convenient to readily grab those items when needed, we rarely notice the other conveniences we are sacrificing by storing them there. We move them every time we wipe the counters. We sacrifice precious prep space when we cook. And they subtly fight for our attention whenever we enter the room.
6. Finish unfinished jobs completely.
When a counter is clear and tidy, it becomes a motivation to put things away. But a cluttered counter attracts clutter… and unfinished jobs are a clutter.
Granted, some projects take more time than others, but many kitchen jobs (washing the dishes, wiping the counters, returning used items, etc.) can be completed right away before ever leaving the kitchen in the first place. For best results, if a job can be finished in less than 2 minutes, do it. Finishing tasks will do wonders for your attitude the next time you walk in.
7. Reset each evening.
If you are lucky, your kitchen gets used every day. And any room that gets used daily will need to be reset daily. That’s why it has been on my evening checklist for a number of years.
We live our lives and often get too used to them. As a result, we get used to our cluttered kitchen counters and don’t realize how freeing it can be to keep them clear. We may be reminded when we walk into a friend’s house or see a photo of a simple kitchen, but we’ve become so accustomed to the current state of ours we forget we can change.
You don’t need to live with a cluttered kitchen countertop. The solution to your kitchen’s countertop organization is indeed simpler than you think.
Image: Yasu’s Photo
Wow! I need this post. I am such a piler of things on our kitchen counter tops (i.e. mail, son’s coloring pages, notes, grocery lists. Thanks for the post.
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We don’t have children so you would think implementing these changes would be easy for us. To be perfectly blunt, my DH is a slob. I love him dearly, but for 31 years it’s been a losing battle trying to get him to develop better habits. It’s more than enough just trying to pick up after myself. I’ve gotten rid of a ton of “stuff” but the kitchen counters and dining table are magnets for everything. This is a very good article, though. Thank you for sharing it.
My DH of 53 years doesn’t pick up after himself, either. That’s why I am trying to be a minimalist. I just have to do it myself.
Thanks–I needed this!
Moving into my new home I kept my kitchen very minimal and clear but when family came to visit and saw how few things I had they went out and bought things I didn’t need or wanted it’s been difficult to explain that I was happy and not in need of any more stuff. The just in case you need it way of thinking seems to be taking up so much room in our lives.
Joshua, I know you have children. How did you manage clear counters when your kids were small? I keep daily use items in the cupboards, but then, come breakfast time, it seems like everyone wants something different out – I try and teach my children independence (i.e. don’t do something for them that they are capable of doing for themselves), but they’re not big enough to get the toaster oven out by themselves, for example. How did you balance those two ideas? Thanks – I love your blog. :-)
My husband says he likes the toaster out and here is his reasoning. If it takes you only 30 seconds to take out the toaster and 30 seconds to put it away over the course of a year, it becomes 365 minutes to access your toaster which is over 6 hours of your life in a year just messing with your toaster. Is it worth having a clutter free counter or would you rather have that 6 hours of your life back? LOL Yes, this is what I deal with when I suggest minimalism! Lol I try to use Gretchen Rubin’s line that “counters are for activity and not for storage” but he always gives me poop about it! Lol
Then don’t ask him. You’re the one in charge of cleanup.
Lol, well, I keep my toaster away now and it takes about 4 seconds to pull it out and plug it in. That being said, my husband only uses on the weekends, the kids and I use it rarely. But my husband still gripes about the four seconds it takes to take it out. And he won’t go through his overstuffed closet to remove things at all. I am working on a “donating to the homeless” angle for his many, many coats. We do what we can but yes, it is challenging to make people who aren’t ready to see the benefits, work with you.
I have my coffee maker and microwave out, that’s it for appliances. One small wicker tote to hold recyclables on their way out to bins. Looks so much neater and cleaner.
I cleaned off kitchen counter…my boyfriend walked into house and asked if we were moving and when I said no he asked if he was getting moved out…no, haha- but shows how much of an impact cleaning a total of 8 feet of counter top.
I’m interested with an appliance garage but I’m afraid this won’t work for me who has an obsession with my coffeemaker. LOL I need to see it on my counter top. I don’t use it daily – I use it several times a day.
We have less than 10sq feet of counter space in my kitchen. I have my toaster oven on a shelf in a cabinet. When I make toast I uncoil the cord and plug it in. I don’t even take it out of the cabinet. I just leave the cabinet door open until I’m done making toast. Unplug, coil the cord and it’s all put away.
I use my kitchen. I don’t use knick knacks on shelves. So, I don’t do knick knacks and I keep the rest of the house pretty clutter free but I’m okay with leaving appliances that I use every single day out on the kitchen counter. Isn’t it just time consuming to put them in the cabinet and then pull them back out every single time?
To me minimalism is more about not accumulating stuff just for the sake of accumulating stuff. But I feel like hiding stuff in the kitchen is just pretending.
Jenn: I really agree with you. I had a family member tell me to hide the spices, Olive oil and blender. I said: we don’t entertain and I like the convenience for everyday use, and who the H really cares if they are friends visiting? I tend to be minimalist overall, yet feel I don’t have to live up to other minimalist people’s expectations.
I think my answer would be that oils and a lot of spices preserve better in the dark, a mistake I often make is leaving them out
I agree with all of these tips (and live by them). However, I have accepted that my kitchen will always be filled– not with mail or unnecessary clutter, but with things I use multiple times a day. I am a single mom of four that is lucky enough to work from home and cook three meals a day, from scratch, with raw ingredients. My kitchen is used probably A LOT more than the average kitchen and, because of the way I cook and my personal appreciation of knowing exactly what is in my family’s food, I have a ton of kitchen items that I feel I need. I have minimized as much as possible for this kind of cooking lifestyle but a lot of it I will not sacrifice. The kitchen is extremely important to me and every single thing that ‘clutters’ my kitchen gets used every single day, most get used multiple times a day. At first it bothered me that I couldn’t get rid of more but I later realized it’s perfectly okay to have an area or certain items you feel you need… for some it’s their books, others maybe it’s their gardening equipment.
What I need is a rock star kitchen filled with bulk items and equipment to feed my herd stellar, wholesome meals… and as quickly as possible.
What is important to remember is what it is you actually value and HELPS you in your lifestyle. What lifestyle is important to you? High quality food and the ability to easily provide that for my family is one of my non-negotiables. So my kitchen will be filled with stuff and I’m ok with that.
With that said– if it doesn’t belong in the kitchen or isn’t being used, get it out.
I actually have to disagree with insisting on keeping the counter completely bare. Functional items that get regular use do their best service when they are ready at hand, rather than having to fuss and bother with opening a cabinet, pulling it out of the counter, plugging it in, and so on…
“Clutter” is when the stuff in your space is interfering with what you want to do in the space. But keeping one’s tools at the ready hardly counts as “clutter” in my mind.
I absolutely agree with this.
Pick and choose your conveniences, but don’t make life harder for yourself.
I make a point of clearing my kitchen counters of all clutter every morning before I leave for work. There’s nothing quiet as nice as walking in the door at the end of a tiring day and seeing a neat and tidy kitchen. It is an Ahhhhhh moment.
I agree… I love that Ahhh feeling !
And they collect dust! I’m working on this. I have a hard time putting away the daily items, but I did get my non-daily items stowed in cabinets yesterday.
I’ve discovered one of the best ways to keep a clean kitchen is to organize your cabinets! When cabinets are not organized, people will be less inclined to put things into them. If people know something will drop on their foot when they open the cabinet door, or that it will be work trying to make an item fit and stay put, they will leave it for someone else to put away, if ever.
Hi. I recently started following this site. Great advice. I’ve been struggling to keep the kitchen counter clean, and I am guilty of many things mentioned. Keeping the coffee maker I only use once a month out. Having a utensil container on the counter. There’s many things out that I only use once a week or even less. Time to go in to find new homes for everything that’s on the counter.
This is a great challenge! Living in an apartment with a small kitchen, its sometimes much easier to leave the things I use daily out instead of trying to find a place to store them. But this does get a person thinking of ways to implement the concept.
I appreciate this reminder. It took me a long time to adopt your method of putting away the coffee grinder and other items.
Now I will focus on keeping it decluttered every night.
I would soooo love to see a picture of your counter!!
THANK YOU! I have been reading your posts for awhile and implementing a couple of the smaller quicker changes but I just spent 6 hours going through my already small kitchen and pulled out all the clutter and unnecessary things. WOW my counter is empty except for a fruit bowl and a knife block. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it! Slowly but surely I am “becoming” a minimalist!
I did away with my knife block (one day I looked down into those slots) and ordered this: Victorinox Swiss Army 14-Slot In-Drawer Cutlery Tray https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AYSC5JM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_xtztybDT4H58N
We love the extra space and the sanitary storage.
I would love, love, love a clutter-free countertop, but with a 1920s farmhouse kitchen from the 1950s and six people, there’s no where else to go with certain things other than the countertop. That said, we can probably do better and have less out than we presently do.
It’s difficult to whip up dinner when you can’t find an inch of work space between that bulky blender, hulking knife block and rickety spice rack. Find ways to clear your food prep area by uncovering surprising new places to stash some of your biggest space hogs.
Amen.