10 ladels / stirring spoons

15 teacups and saucers

2 cheese graters

A couple of out of date ingredients

1 chaotic food cupboard

These are just a few of the findings from my kitchen decluttering exercise this afternoon. Personally I found this interesting as I only moved into my house four months ago, and prior to settling in we did a massive kitchen minimizing exercise.

Far too often, we collect and acquire too much of everything around the home. The average household now has around 200,000 items in it. Does that surprise you?

Too many possessions can lead to never having enough room to store anything, hours wasted cleaning up before guests and visitors arrive, and a lot of wasted money. The fewer items owned, the easier it is to keep your house clean and clutter free.

The kitchen is one of the hardest places to keep clutter free and to minimise. Why? Because it is quite often the heart of the home. The place where families gather for meals, where you prepare food, iron clothes and make a cup of coffee whilst you catch up on the day that just passed.

What to minimise?

So how do you decide what to remove or what is adding to your home having that ‘busy and disorganised’ feeling about it?

If you have multiple items which do the same thing, you probably don’t need all of them. If you think an area looks way too cluttered, it probably is, so see what you can remove. Things that you’re keeping ‘just in case’.

So today I tackled the kitchen and I removed the duplicates (goodbye second cheese grater) and boxed them up to donate them to a local charity store.

I also rearranged the food cupboard and fridge making sure that everything in there was in date, and had an allocated place to make putting items away in future much easier. This also highlighted two things to me:

Food has an unnecessary amount of packaging. I need to try and find a way to buy with less waste. This will be one of my new aims for the year. I buy way too much for the food cupboard. I mean I have seven different jars / cans of tomatoes in one form or another. If I hadn’t cleared out my cupboard I might have gone and bought another two in this weeks shop. From now on, I am going to continue meal planning but then only buy those ingredients and no extras.

Your Space

Think about your kitchen right now. Do you have more cookbooks than you might ever use and actually, you find most recipes online these days so you could probably free up a shelf or two?

It’s time to address your kitchen counters, and put away anything that isn’t necessary to have out.

Give everything a home, and put it away after use. If you clean up straight away it’s easier to keep a kitchen clutter free, and makes it easier to start cooking when you’re next in there.

Ten Things You Can Minimise Today

Below are ten common items that you can minimise today in your kitchen to really get you started in your quest for living life with less: