Winter is prime time for a kitchen clean sweep

By Lisa Abraham/Akron Beacon Journal

A month after the holiday season, is your kitchen still decorated with a trail of cookie crumbs and broken candy canes?

Is your refrigerator filled with the aging remains of party food, molding cheese and ham that’s well into its second curing?

 You aren’t alone in your mess. With cooking, baking and entertaining, our kitchens tend to take a beating over the holidays.

Making an annual ritual of organizing the kitchen is a good winter resolution.

Tallmadge, Ohio, resident Marcia Cianchetti pointed to her kitchen table covered with the remains of the holidays — containers of candied cherries for fruitcakes she never baked, a bread machine her daughter dragged out of storage to take back with her to college, a food-filled basket her husband received as a Christmas gift, an empty tin from cookies a neighbor sent over, newspapers, dishes, presents and more.

Because her family eats in the dining room, the kitchen table and its nook off the back of the room have become a quasi-storage area and dumping ground for her family’s stuff.

“Honestly, I just have too much stuff. Thirty-one years ago, I had half the cupboard space I have now and I had plenty of room. Now, I have twice the space and I still don’t have room for everything,” she says.

The 58-year-old retired baker said the holidays are particularly challenging because of all of the new items that came into the house as gifts, and because her youngest daughter was home from college and she wanted to make sure the refrigerator was well-stocked with her favorites.

Now the amount of food left over was making Cianchetti nervous.

Professional organizer Jamie Escola, of Calm and Collected Organizing of Canton, Ohio, said Cianchetti’s situation is typical. “It’s human nature. If we have the space, we will fill it up,” she says.

Escola gave a walk-through of Cianchetti’s kitchen to offer tips on how to get a kitchen organized and keep it that way.

She likes to practice a technique known as SPACE, created by organizer Julie Morgenstern:

 S — Sort through your stuff.

P — Purge anything that is expired, broken or unused.

A — Assign everything a home.

C — Containerize your items.

E — Equalize your space.

In Cianchetti’s case, her kitchen offers ample storage — two large pantry cupboards (one for food and one for equipment) and a generous number of cupboards to hold dishes, glasses and other items. All of them are filled.

Escola said to begin by sorting all of it and purging.

For food in the pantry, refrigerator and freezer, get rid of expired packages, stale items or food that you know won’t be eaten. Particularly at the holidays, when food gifts are common, we tend to end up with food that we may not actually use. If you know a bottle of exotic vinegar is not something you will open, don’t be afraid to donate it to a food pantry or give it to a friend who will.

But deciding what to keep and what to get rid of can be difficult.

Escola said saving items like baskets or tins isn’t always a bad idea, because it does cost to replace them and most of us may need one from time to time. But you can’t realistically save all of them. She suggested setting a small number to keep — no more than five — to be stored in the basement. “That way, you’ll have one on hand if you want to make a gift basket for someone else,” Escola says. But when basket No. 6 enters the house, it’s time to get rid of one.

When it comes to storing off site in the basement or garage, Escola said again it is important to set a limit; otherwise you will fill up the basement. Assign three basement shelves for kitchen overflow. When that space is filled, it’s time to purge again, she said.

Sometimes, Escola said, you just have to give yourself permission to get rid of things and donating is always a good option.

“Ask yourself, ‘Is it something I really need or that adds to the enjoyment of my kitchen?’ If it does, you need to create a home for it. It’s basically about weighing the positives and the negatives and about letting go,” Escola says.

Assigning everything a home is the next step, and is crucial to getting and staying organized. If you always put coupons and receipts in the same place, then you’ll always know where to look for them when you need them, Escola said. The space doesn’t have to be a perfectly organized file. It can be just a box, basket or drawer. But as long as you use it for paper and only paper, you’ll always know where to find items and you’ll avoid paper clutter taking over your countertops.

The time to buy plastic bins, containers and organizers is after you have given everything a home, so you will buy the right container for the job. “Resist the temptation to go out and purchase new containers, products and organizing tools, because then you have to organize around them. Take stock of what you have first,” Escola says.

She is a big fan of baskets or plastic bins for holding like items — for example, bags of nuts and baking morsels. They keep supplies together, and can be pulled in and out, essentially creating drawers on shelves.

The final step, equalizing, is about maintaining the new order.

Eliminating the multiples is a great way to create space and will help to stop food waste, too.

Before going grocery shopping, Escola says, “Shop your pantry first.” If you have three bags of rice, then plan some meals using rice to help pare it down. Knowing that you have three bags at home already also should stop you from bringing home a fourth.

Now that you have a plan, getting started can be the hardest part.

Escola recommends starting with all flat surfaces first — counters, islands and tabletops. Eliminating the visual clutter will immediately transform the kitchen’s appearance, and it will give you space to work when you want to tackle what’s inside the cupboards and drawers.

Professional organizer Beverly Coggins, who ran her business, 1-2-3 … Get Organized, from her home in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, before recently relocating to Montana, said it is important to create functional areas within a kitchen.

Hooks by the door for keys work well, and so does a basket for important items like school papers that need to be signed and party invitations that need replies. “If you keep it all in one place, then you aren’t screaming around the place to try and find things,” she says.

The idea is to create spaces where everything you need for a particular task is organized in a single space.

Coggins said one of the best ways to deal with maintenance is to make it a part of your daily routine.

“At the end of the day, make sure things are cleared off kitchen counters,” she says.