Here are some before and after snaps of a recent kitchen organisation project in Nottingham. Sophie and Alex are baking addicts and cook from scratch A LOT. So, it’s safe to say they have lots of ingredients but they also had an amazing amount of space in their recently renovated kitchen but they didn’t know quite how to use it in the best way. Plus they had a habit of buying things they already had in. I left them with a shopping list of items they DON’T need to buy for a while!
I followed the usual process of getting everything out of the cupboards to see what space we actually had, discussing changing the locations of most of their items and then we started decluttering (there’s always some mugs that can go!) and organising into relevant categories before putting everything back in a slightly different way.
Now it’s easier for them to see what they have before buying more, they have a dedicated breakfast station and their biscuits are where they should be – near the tea! We also moved a lot of duplicates into their utility room as to use as a backstock and moved some of Alex’s Myprotein stash to the main kitchen area where it’s more handy for him to access.
Check out the before, during and after snaps below.
The Before
“Tidy Friday spent the day organising our chaos and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s immediately changed how I feel about my home.”
The During
“I’m a stressed and messy person and don’t have the headspace to sort things out.” – Sophie
Sophie runs her own business and doesn’t find tidying therapeutic so it just becomes another chore to add to an already bulging list. Now, she knows where things go and can easily pop things back where they belong giving a sense of calm to one of the most used rooms in the house.
The After
“We were at the point of literally buying more storage because we thought we had no space. This has saved me hundreds!”
In the end, Sophie & Alex were left with empty cupboards because we didn’t actually need all of the space they had, Sophie was shocked!
Alex had already started to tackle their extensive spice collection and had done an awesome job at decanting them into their respective jars. I simply grouped their excess spices into a tray to make it easier to keep tidy within the cupboard and we moved their extra bags to refill them with into a spare cupboard that wasn’t being used after we’d cleared it out.
I’m not here to make your cupboards pristine (unless you want me to) and I’m also not here to make you decant every single bag of dried food you own into containers which take up even more room. With Sophie and Alex’s kitchen we grouped their ingredients together, used glass Kilner jars they already owned to house large quantities of sugar and things like rice but kept everything else neatly contained within IKEA crates in their separate sections.
As they had a lot of different ingredients we would have had to fill their whole cupboards with container after container and it would have made the whole process even harder to find what they needed each time they wanted to cook or bake.
I’ve also suggested some additional shelving to add to their baking cupboard to make things even easier to access as their cupboards were amazingly deep and wide – they’re definitely lucky with the space they have but this meant they were spreading things over different cupboards and forgetting what they had.
Do you feel like you need a little Tidy Friday help in your home? Pop me a direct message on Instagram or email allie@thefridaygirl.co.uk for inquiries about in-house and virtual organisation appointments, tips and unpacking help!
