The Geek’s Guide to Rebooting Your Kitchen [Video]

Making your kitchen more efficient isn’t that different from hacking your workday-decide what you certainly do, and trim the resistance to doing it. Here’s tips to upgrade your kitchen with a pen, a number of hours, and fairly cheap upgrades.

To be honest, the center of my own kitchen’s recent reboot was not cheap-it was a total gut and remodel, with contractors and drywall and all that fun stuff. Putting the basis-level changes aside, it was also a possibility to empty out our cabinets and drawers, pack up your complete dry goods and spices, and rethink where we needed everything to head. You are able to try this, too: piece by piece, or, you know, that you would be able to jam it all into four hours of French-press-fueled mania on a Saturday night, as shown inside the clip above. Your call.

Armed with a replica of Cooking for Geeks (specifically its chapter on ” Organize Your Kitchen Like a Programmer” ) and a number of advice from foodie friends and design blogs, here’s how I was in a position to improve by moving things around, buying cheap after-market upgrades, or scribbling with a dry-erase pen.

Issue One: Everything Is simply Type of Everywhere

I know what you mean. On reflection at how our original kitchen was packed, the methodology is likely to be ” It Fits Here, So It Goes Here.” Most of us are so understandably anxious to go into a new kitchen, we don’t take time to consider how the small inconveniences-walking over in finding a pan, shopping for a spice, digging through a junk drawer-add up to steal time and make your cooking space feel less comfortable.

Start with a listing-a very simple list. Walk through per week of cooking and living on your kitchen for your head. What do you truly cook? What gear do you cook it with? What spices and ingredients typically go into your meals? Don’t wade through your ideal week, where you’re making interesting magazine recipes and eating healthy whole grains every morning. Battle through your actual week, with leftovers, takeout surrenders, and lazy weekend mornings included.

Walking through my own week, I spotted that my wife and I even have a stock American view of weekday meals: protein, starch vegetable. Most of those meals are made on the stovetop or with minimal ovenware. Wilted greens or steamed vegetables, rice or baked potatoes, broiled fish or stir-fried chicken. Some weeks we eat healthier, some weeks we take pleasure in 14-ingredient roasts, but pans and boiling water are the mainstays. Our recipes generally use olive oil, salt, pepper, maybe some vinegar, and infrequently some fresh or dried spices, but we save the allspice and 18-year balsamic vinegar for the meals where we’re impressing guests, and have lots more time to dig and reach.

Once we’re not making dinners or basic breakfasts, we’re making coffee or tea. A lot of it. Beyond that, we’re occasionally baking food, or baking cookies or other goods, and sometimes using gadgets like a food processor or mandoline slicer. I roughly drew out my kitchen divided into sections, with essentially the mostsome of the most-used things as close as possible to the stove and sink, no bending or reaching required.

Standard kitchen designs aren’t always the most convenient for efficiency and space conservation. While you can, hang your pots and pans. It not only makes it easy to grab them and always put them back within the same place, but frees up a complete cabinet. Julia Child hung her own pots and pans from a pegboard-which, once you don’t believe it, you’ll discover within the Smithsonian. Similarly, see in the event you can move your spices from the cabinet that’s usually right near the stove into a drawer-more on this slightly further on.

Cooking for Geeks suggests an effortless, revolutionary idea: ” Storing your everyday kitchen tools near the food items with which they’re more often than not used.” Combined with the fundamental outline I’d made above, that freed me to do good stuff. I put the French press pot and low grinder on a similar shelf as the coffee beans, and gave them all a whole shelf, right next to the fridge that held the opposite components: water and cream. I hung a spare set of measuring spoons next to the spices, and a hard and fast of measuring cups near the bulk goods. The can opener went inside the drawer closest to our cans, the oven mitts as close as possible to the oven-you get the assumption. It looks simple, written out, but inspect your individual kitchen-is it organized by function, or groups of semi-similar stuff?

Issue Two: The Spice Paradox

You want your spices easily accessible, but in addition, you don’t. It really is, you would like them convenient to seek out and pull out, but you furthermore may want them kept dark and cool, and so far from the stove.

Cooking for Geeks suggests holding your spices in a drawer in place of a cabinet. Here is where buying your individual spice jars pays off. That you would be able to label the tops of your jars, then arrange them in whatever system (alphabetical, cuisine, regularity of use) you’d like. In the event that your cabinet seems just a shade too short, look to look when you can modify it to fit. Geeks author Jeff Potter managed to shave 1.5 inches off his own drawer by removing a nonstructural slat from the front. Image via flit .

In my kitchen, that tactic wouldn’t fly, as the drawers are just too narrow, or deep, to make decent spice stores. So I had to take advantage of a cabinet that was just far enough from the stove, but I still improved my situation. I grabbed two of these two-tier chrome shelves for $5 each, and they fit my cabinet perfectly. Label your jars so that the spice name is higher up, and you’ll have the capacity to see everything right now, with no need to knock over five jars only to not find the nutmeg within the back.

While you’re getting your tiny jars back onto the shelves, check their expiration dates , and be ruthless in tossing anything that’s a fine bit beyond its prime. Spices get notably dull with time and exposure, and dull spices create dull food.

Issue Three: Lids-Awful, Awful Lids

Lids feel like the third wheel in my loving relationship with my pots and pans. Sure, they’re occasionally useful, but they’re annoying to store, being neither perfectly flat nor easily stacked.

We’ve previously suggested two repurposing tricks that our commenters are fans of: the curtain rod as lid-handle holder , and a versatile vertical file holder . i’ll turn out to be going with the curtain rods. A $5.99 vertical organizer I tried out is going right back to Bed Bath & Beyond, as it both can’t hold larger lids without tilting, and holds them too high to close even my tallest drawer. A cheaper incline file sorter from an office supply store fared no better. If I was inside the spending mood, a pull-out cookware organizer might do the trick, but after a kitchen remodel, i’m really not in that mood. (In case you’ve got an effective way to stash your lids, by all means-share it within the comments.)

Issue Four: Junk Drawers

Lifehacker reader Lionel Felix offers this advice for a no-nonsense kitchen clean-out : you should be ruthless. Admit that you just made mistakes for your previous purchases, and admit that a drawer with only some useful items is way handier than a stuffed drawer that barely opens. Above is what my drawers to the left of my stove appeared like, just before my four-hour binge.

Looking around at Lowes (which, no less than at my location, has a whole row devoted to Kitchen Organization), I found a expandable ” cutlery drawer” , and it’s even cheaper on Amazon .

Standard cutlery trays are typically cheap and plastic, and in the event you’re renting, they won’t look right for your next kitchen. But choose wood or metal, and ensure it’s expandable, and a tray like this allows you to compartmentalize your not-quite-essential gear-pizza wheels, pastry brushes, tongs, etc. The expanding nature fits both narrow tools and wider items. Once you still can’t fit everything in and close your drawer, you’ll need to decide if it’s worth re-arranging everything to fit that one extra-long whisk, or if it can go up on a top shelf.

Issue Five: In-Between Items

There’s things you probably use a few times a year: electric turkey carvers, gigantic salad bowls, outdoor ice buckets. Then there are the items you bring out occasionally, but infrequently. They wish space, but you want as much close-at-hand space for the belongings you cook with.

So spend a little time finding the proper deal you may on a step stool. Read reviews, make certain it’s sturdy, buy one a piece taller than you’d normally have, and ensure it doesn’t look too bad folded up inside or just outside your kitchen. Then place your in-between items on the head shelves of your cabinets-or on top of the cabinets, in case you’re just plain out of room. It sort of feels like the other of efficiency, but the twice-a-year, 10-foot lugging of a step stool is going to be far less painful than having a turkey roasting pan fall on you if you’re rooting around, attempting to find that thing you truly do use every so often. When you lack for prime shelves or tops-of-cabinets, put the stuff for your basement, spare closets-just in other places. Be terribly honest with yourself about what you cook within the time you could have, and you’ll get to cook more in that time.

Issue Six: Groceries Wander off in Cabinets

It’s true-once I was re-stocking my shelves, I was amazed at the three varieties of wild rice, five flavors of cocoa mix, and nigh innumerable volumes of diverse sugars we’d somehow socked away. Regardless of how much cabinet space you have got, stuff always ends up behind other stuff. You could possibly even cook that stuff, if only you can find it.

One solution I’m liking is half-inspired by Cooking for Geeks, half-inspired by my wife’s love of marking up paper. Post-It (and lots other brands) make ” Page Markers” , intended for sticking into books and removing without damage. The efficiency is that they’re only partially sticky. So buy yourself some uniform storage containers-glass preferably, with airtight lids-and use these notes for straightforward stick-on, tear-off labeling of your entire weird belongings you pick up from recipes and buy on a whim.

Honestly? My kitchen isn’t done with a capital D. I’m still finding out several odds and ends, and I am entirely open to ideas.

What’s the massive time-sucker and groan-inducer to your kitchen? What’s the correct piece of cheap gear, or clever fix, you’ve seen in a cooking space? Share the links and war stories inside the comments.

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This post is tagged: cheap upgrades, foodie friends, inconveniences, magazine recipes, saturday night