6 Things You Should Never Buy, According to These Professional Organizers

If you’re planning to organize your kitchen (or really, any other area of your house), your first step might involve buying organizers. It seems like a no brainer: To get organized, you have to buy organizers, right? Meh. Not so fast. We recently spoke to a few professional organizers and they were pretty quick to share the tools they’d never buy when tasked with getting a kitchen in order.

Here are six items these professional organizers think you should avoid (or get rid of!) — and what to get instead.

Caroline Solomon, a New York-based pro organizer, admits that tea organizers sound like a convenient storage method. The problem is, not only can they be tedious to routinely fill up with individual tea bags, but they can also take up a surprising amount of cabinet space.

Better solution: Solomon suggests investing in gorgeous shelf risers, like these from Open Spaces, to neatly stock with favorite boxes of teas. No refilling necessary.

On the one hand, Solomon says over-the-sink dish racks are great space-saving tools that take advantage of vertical space, but they can also make your sink area feel cramped. Plus, it can make it tough to clean your dirty dishes if you have to work around already-cleaned ones!

Better solution: If you’re low on countertop space, consider using a large foldable dish rack, like this modern option, available at West Elm. When not in use, you can easily hide it in a cabinet out of sight!

Cooking beneath heavy pots and pans suspended mid-air can make some people feel pretty uneasy, observes Solomon. Everything is out in the open, which may work if you have a gorgeous pan set, but for others, it may be an eyesore.

Better solution: Consider placing your pots and pans in a cabinet lined with a cookware rack. Solomon loves this expandable one from YouCopia.

Related: The 7 Best Organizers for All Your Cookware Lids, According to the Pros

Another organizing method Solomon doesn’t love: mug trees. “Aside from taking up valuable countertop space, this also just looks and feels completely random,” she says.

Better solution: If you’re a daily coffee or tea drinker, she suggests placing your favorite mugs on an inexpensive shelf riser (like this one) in your cabinet or on your countertop.

Michelle Vig, a pro organizer with Neat Little Nest, says she never buys expandable utensil organizers because she finds they never quite fit right in drawers, and you end up wasting a lot of space.

Better solution: Vig takes a more customized approach with individual drawer organizers, using these bamboo organizers from The Container Store. This way, you can use every last inch of space.

To keep the area under your kitchen sink orderly, you may need the help of an organizer. But Abby Kahn, founder of Abbsolutely Organized, says she never recommends anything made from flimsy white plastic, which won’t hold up over time. She also says to stay away from bulky organizers because cleaning sprays and tools will get lost and be hard to see.

Better solution: For the under-sink area, Kahn suggests labeled deep bins, which use the full space of the cabinet while keeping items sorted, contained, and visible. Her favorite ones are sturdy deep drawer bins from The Container Store. They’re clear so everything is easy-to-find, and the bins have handles so they are convenient to pull out!

Do you have household kitchen items on your never-buy or never-again list? Tell us in the comments below.