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Imagine a kitchen where everything is within easy reach, where every plate, pan, glass, and small appliance can be quickly retrieved from its readily accessible, easy-to-remember locale. In this kitchen, returning items to their assigned quarters—without having to wrangle other stuff out of the way—is a breeze.
To those of us contending with inadequate cabinet space, such a scenario may sound out of reach—both logistically and metaphorically.
Yet even in a small kitchen, with just a bit of troubleshooting, it’s possible to organize cabinets so they’re more user-friendly and space-efficient. In fact, the hardest part may be reexamining your ideas about what needs to live where.
“When it comes to your kitchen cabinets, you want to store things where it makes the most sense and where they’re going to be the most utilized—not where you think they ‘should’ go,” said Naeemah Ford Goldson, founder of the National Association of Black Professional Organizers.
Here’s a straightforward guide to organizing your kitchen cabinets to free up storage space, clear away clutter, and make sure everything you need is nearby when you need it.
This may be hard to hear, but your dinner plates should get divorced. While we’re at it, your bowls should also consider breaking up. And your cups may need to consciously uncouple.
In other words, not all of these items need to be stored in the same place—yes, even if they match, and especially if you have a lot more of them than you do household members who use them.
“It depends on how often you use and do dishes, but if you’re in a house of two or three people, you may only need to keep four or five plates in everyday rotation,” professional organizer Katrina Green told us. The rest of the items can be stored in your highest cabinets, in another piece of storage furniture, or even boxed up in a closet or your basement until you really need them.
Green also suggests keeping only one or two nice wine glasses or Champagne flutes with your everyday, easy-reach items. Goldson recommends carving out storage space near your stove to keep the one pan, pot, and spatula you use the most. That way, you don’t have to hunt for them in the depths of an inconvenient, less-accessible drawer or cabinet filled with other cookware. (A wok can handle several different cooking tasks. And the Victorinox Swiss Army Slotted Fish Turner we recommend for lots of non-seafood-related jobs has a hang tag on its handle, so it’s easy to store by the stove on a magnetic, stick-on, or screw-in hook.)
Cabinets aren’t a kitchen’s only storage spaces. Below, we outline places you can look for more space to conveniently house items you use daily.
Countertops: “If you use your blender every day, it really has to stay on the counter,” Green said. However, if aesthetics are of primary importance to you, it’s fine to store your more visually appealing appliances on the counter, and that will create cabinet space for other stuff. (We’d like to note that the KitchenAid Stand Mixer boasts such a classic design and meaningful history it’s part of the collection at the National Museum of American History.)
Walls: Make like Julia Child and create your own batterie de cuisine with a piece of pegboard attached to a patch of wall. In our guide to small-kitchen ideas, we recommend the Wall Control Metal Pegboard, which comes in an array of fun colors and can be accessorized with a variety of hooks and/or shelves. (If that seems like too much work, we also recommend the sleek and simple Range Kleen Expanding Bar Pot Rack.)
These sturdy metal pegboards are great for taking advantage of unused wall space. They’re easy to install, and they securely hold pots, pans, and utensils.
Drawers: While kitchen drawers are usually reserved for items like towels and silverware, editor Amy Kravetz has ingeniously allocated a kid-height drawer for her children to access themselves. “I use a Tupperware bin for their small plastic bowls and another to hold their little forks and spoons,” she said. “Both of those bins fit in one drawer.”
In most kitchens, upper cabinets tend to be shallower than lower cabinets. That means less standing on your tiptoes and grasping blindly for stuff at the back. But it also means you’ve got to make the most of their height to compensate for their lack of depth.
Whether you’re a homeowner or a renter, and whether you’re extensively or absolutely not handy with household tools, the following organizational accessories can help you do this quickly and inexpensively.
Shelf risers: “Risers are so efficient, especially when storing plates in taller shelves,” Green said. “They can create zones between big and small plates, as well as between different size mugs and coffee cups.” We’ve previously recommended The Container Store’s shelf risers, which are made of vinyl-coated wire.
Plate racks: If you stack your plates one on top of the other and you’re happy with that setup, stick with it. But if you find that stacking makes it difficult to access plates you need at the bottom, or you just want your plates to take up less horizontal real estate on a shelf, a rack that stores them vertically could be the solution.
“A plate rack can be more space-efficient than stacking if you have plates of different sizes that you want to store separately, like dinner plates and dessert plates,” said senior editor Marguerite Preston, who heads Wirecutter’s kitchen team. “Putting those two in side-by-side stacks in a cabinet occupies a bigger footprint than a rack.”
Marguerite recommends the Yamazaki Tosca Wide White Dish Storage Rack, which is used in Wirecutter’s test kitchen. For something more customizable, she recommends the Yamazaki Home Rack Stand/Storage Plate Holder.
Note that we don’t necessarily recommend those wooden, pegged plate racks, which provide individual slots for each plate. Marguerite said that even though they look pretty, they “definitely do not seem very space-efficient and wouldn’t necessarily work for all plates.”
Water-bottle organizer: These days, we all seem to have so many (too many?) water bottles but no great way to store them. So it might be worth it to buy a dedicated rack where you can keep them neatly corralled. Senior editor Erica Ogg swears by the YouCopia UpSpace Bottle Organizer. “It brings me and our crazy number of water bottles great joy,” she said.
Cup hooks and stemware racks: Speaking of drinking vessels being in disarray, cup hooks can help you capitalize on every last inch of vertical space between cabinets—without having to precariously stack your delicate glassware. (We like BronaGrand Nickel Plated Metal Screw-in Cup Hooks.) Hooks are also great for hanging cooking utensils. (Side note: If you want to display your mug collection, Green said a mug tree on a countertop is a good choice, though it’s not space-efficient when used in a cabinet.)
Wine glasses and other stemware can be hung upside down from the underside of a shelf or cabinet. And we’ve found that the Winco GHC-10 Chrome Plated Wire Glass Hanger fits most glasses and is the easiest model to install. (Just be sure to check the thickness of your drilling surface first, since the Winco hanger’s screws may be too long for some cupboards.)
This easy-to-install metal rack fits a variety of stemware sizes, and it takes advantage of unused cupboard space.
For safety reasons, your heaviest kitchen items should go in your lower cabinets. But since we all hate getting down on our knees to drag an Instant Pot or slow cooker out of the cabinet, our experts (and several Wirecutter staffers) agreed that the best way to increase accessibility is to use rollout shelves. They require much less crouching to find what you need, and you don’t have to move other items out of the way first.
Goldson said she uses The Container Store’s 14-inch Commercial Roll-Out Drawer in her own kitchen. And staff writer Mel Plaut outfitted their pots-and-pans cabinet with Rev-A-Shelf Single-Tier Pull-Out Baskets.
Then there are the lower-cabinet items that may not weigh a ton but block easy access to other items. Corralling is key here. For starters, consider installing a pot-lid rack inside a cabinet door. Our top-pick Organize It All Cabinet Door Lid Rack can hold six lids of various sizes, and it can also live on a wall if need be.
This wall-mounting pot-lid holder keeps lids organized and opens up valuable cupboard and drawer space.
If you have a couple of no-installation-required devices, it can be even simpler to store cutting boards and baking sheets. In addition to housing smaller cutting boards, the SimpleHouseware Over the Cabinet Door Organizer can serve as a home for boxes of foil, sandwich bags, and the like.
This door-mounted basket adds a bit more storage behind a cupboard door. It’s great for stashing aluminum foil, plastic wrap, zip-top bags, or cutting boards.
In the YouCopia StoreMore Adjustable Bakeware Rack, cutting boards can stand upright in a tall, narrow cabinet alongside baking sheets, pie plates, muffin tins, serving trays, cooling racks, and more.
This rack saves space by keeping baking pans and cutting boards upright and contained.
This article was edited by Annemarie Conte.
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