I Sent a Pro Organizer Photos of My “Chaotic” Kitchen Cabinets, and Here’s How She Helped Me

One of my summer goals is to organize my kitchen — namely, the cabinets. Behind the solid wood doors lies total chaos on the shelves. That’s why I decided to reach out to professional organizer Sarah Giller Nelson, owner of Less is More Organizing Services, for her expert advice on how to get my cabinets in order. 

Spoiler alert: Nelson’s advice is gold. My kitchen cabinets’ organization has improved, and I’m still tweaking some shelves with her guidance, which I’ll share with you here.

The first step you should take is to declutter with a focus on getting rid of any expired foods, chipped dishes and glasses, random food storage container tops, and any unused specialty tools and utensils. I’ve gotten good at decluttering these things regularly because I found only one expired can of beans, and my Tupperware all somehow matched. 

When it comes to the overall organization, Nelson says that “a general principle for a kitchen organization project is that items should be placed based on the frequency of use, then made pretty using organizing supplies. As much as I wanted to jump straight to Nelson’s advice about buying pretty supplies, I took a hard look at where things were placed on my shelves. 

Sure enough, there were items on the top shelves that I stepped on a footstool to access regularly. My quick fix was to swap out those items with those on the next lower shelf which, oddly enough, I didn’t use nearly as often; I had simply put them back there because the shelf was easier to reach.

Even on my laziest of days emptying the dishwasher, I always make sure the cups are put back with other cups and dishes with other dishes. But Nelson recommended keeping glassware in a completely separate cabinet from plates and bowls.

This gave me pause due to the layout of my cabinets. I’ve been in kitchens where there’s a slender cabinet, perfect for stacking only mugs and cups. But I’ll admit that with my larger cabinets, my plates have been living on the opposite side of the shelf from my glasses, while mugs have been relegated to the next cabinet. 

I removed my glasses and put them on the counter. On that now-empty shelf, I rehomed plates and serving bowls from the other cabinet so that now most of the cabinet was taken up by plates, bowls, and serving platters. It looked so much better already; I don’t even care that I’ll now have to open up another cabinet to get glasses when setting the table.

Nelson also suggested that food cabinets should contain only food, which meant that I needed to rehome (and perhaps declutter) a few water bottles I had stacked high above canned and dry food.

Nelson noticed I was using risers to make the most of vertical space in my cabinets. She instead suggested I remove the riser and lower the shelving. I was game to try it, but I hit a roadblock: The anchors holding the shelves were too secure for me to move them without a second set of hands. I remembered then that I had tried to adjust the shelves when my husband and I first moved in, but I feared one of us would break the anchors or a finger, so risers it was.

I thought I was so clever using a riser to split the vertical space. And I would have been if I had used it properly, according to Nelson. “Shelf risers are best for organizing multiples of the same, like the mugs, but with pantry items, it becomes hard to see what is in the back on the bottom,” she says.

Nelson’s right. I’ll remove the risers from the food cabinet because there’s no way I’ll store that many duplicates in it.

My family keeps a large closet in the living room we call “the bunker” lined with steel shelving units to store non-perishable food and other housekeeping supplies. Pride kept me from sending photos of that debacle (also on my summer to-do list) to Nelson, but I did tell her it existed. Not surprisingly, she told me to use it more often to free up my kitchen cabinets by placing infrequently used tools or holiday serving platters there. I already use the high cabinets above the fridge for some of this, but I will review what I can also put away in the bunker.

Nelson gently called out my collection of mugs that included a set of matching mugs mixed among other novelty ones. Not only did the cabinet currently look like a sales shelf at HomeGoods, but there was also no way my husband and I would ever get through using every single mug before it was time to rerun the dishwasher. I removed the novelty mugs and arranged the set of gray mugs on top of/below the riser. The whole cabinet looked put-together in under five minutes.

Cute bins are useless if you can’t see what’s in them. I had some gray and black plastic bins that needed to be pulled out to see what was in them, which was an annoying waste of time. I’ll see if I can go without them entirely, but if not, Nelson recommends purchasing more of the clear bins I had in another cabinet. 

I spared Nelson from seeing my lower kitchen cabinets, which contain some pots, pans, and single-use items that we never use. As she suggested, I’ll declutter these or banish them to the bunker. Farewell, salad spinner!

I had always thought a kitchen cabinet reorganization would take an entire day, but I made considerable progress in about half an hour. Armed with a wealth of Nelson’s organizing knowledge and far fewer mugs, I will bravely continue to organize my cabinets.

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy. See it there: I Sent a Pro Organizer Photos of My “Chaotic” Kitchen Cabinets, and Here’s How She Helped Me