Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is your kitchen layout working? Is the struggle of how to get organized getting you close to your boiling point? Watch this video, and get to the point. Following these organizing tips will make meal time and all of your kitchen time less stressful and more productive. You can earn big brownie points by making the brownies easier to make in the first place.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDProximity.)
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Lorie Marrero creator of The Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about where to put your stuff away. How do you decide?
We’re in my kitchen right now, because it’s a great place to discuss this issue. There is a lot going on in a kitchen; we have a lot of activity going on; we have a lot of gear; and we have a lot of tools that are fixed into place that we have to work around. So I want to start right there. There is a design concept called “The Work Triangle” that’s comprised of your sink, your stove, and your refrigerator. So these three elements are heavily considered in kitchen cabinet design, but as a professional organizer, I have two more elements that I also consider in placement of objects, and those are the dishwasher and the kitchen table. The reason is that you have to think about this concept – which really is what I want to talk about today – proximity. I also refer to this as point of use. This concept may seem extremely obvious, but the idea is that you want to place objects close to where you’re going to use them. For example, you’ve got your potholders that you want to have near the stove and near the oven, so you’ll have them when you have something hot to handle. And you would be so surprised how often we go into a client’s home and we don’t see objects placed close to their point of use. So that’s why it bears repeating and it bears thinking about.
So you want to consider this proximity when you’re looking at all of these fixed elements in your kitchen. We have another video that we have about the four “F” words that I use when I organize, so those are Features, Frequency, Flow, and Function. And when you are looking at these work triangle fixed elements, you’re really looking at the fixed features, you’re looking at the flow between them, and what you want to do is make sure when you’re considering those, you look at the proximity and sometimes put things away close to two of those features, even two or more. Like, for example, your drinking glasses. You might want to put those near the dishwasher, but also near a water source like your refrigerator dispenser or your sink. So, there’s a lot to consider and, you know, if you really need some help with this, you can look at this product that we invented. On the job as organizers we really needed a system to help us think through all of this stuff when we’re organizing our clients’ kitchens. So, I created the SpaceScaping Kitchen Organizing System which is a set of labels with temporary adhesive so that we can strategically place all this stuff before we start moving it around. You can see a lot about how this works, if you want to, on the page where we sell it. It’s at https://www.clutterdiet.com/kitchen.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to save time and energy in the kitchen or best strategy for cabinet organization.
The kitchen is certainly one of the most difficult places to get organized, IMO. But once you get it the way it works for you then the rest of the house can fall into place as well.