How Do You Keep Your Cabinets?

[Sherry]

A better title for this thread might have been "Can Anyone But Yourself Find Their Way Around In Your Kitchen?".
About twice a year, no more, I go through my kitchen cabinets (drawers, too) and straighten, arrange, etc. I don't know what the record time is, but it's never long before everything is back in the same happy (for me, apparently) disarray that it was in before the straightening.
My kitchen is clean. The counter space, most times, is uncluttered. The floors are usually clean within reason, considering they're white and I live on a farm--boy was that a mistake. The white, not the farm.
Anyway, if something happened to me and I were unable to cook I highly doubt that anyone could come in and use my kitchen without first removing everything from the cabinets and drawers and putting it all back together themselves.
So what about you. Are you an everything in it's place type? Or a mess-pot like me?

 

[welsh dragon]

A place for everything and everything in its place. I have a room that has been turned into a kind of giant larder or food room. Everything is on open shelves and can be seen straight away from sauces, to cereals, tins of stuff etc. All the cooking pots are in the kitchen itself.

 

[Caribbean girl]

Some of what I use in my kitchen is kept in cabinets, like sauces, spices and cereals, and some are kept on the open counter where I can see them. Utensils like pots and pans are kept in a bottom cupboard until I need to use them. Other foodstuffs are kept in a separate cupboard. I always know where to find everything. I would say for the most part that most of what I use in the kitchen on a daily basis is fairly well organized, so it would not take a newcomer a long time to get accustomed to where everything can be found.

Where the cabinet drawers are concerned, that is another story. Some of the drawers have in kitchen tools that have not been used for quite a while, so that is where most of the clearing out and organization would need to be done, although the cabinets also need going through once in a while.

 

[winterybella]

I feel I fall somewhere in between a clean bird and a mess pot. When I am rushing and that is almost always, I can create quite a mess during the actual process. Once I am finish I will clean almost immediately, except for those times when I have cooked up a storm.

A girlfriend told me years ago that if I am running late and there is a mess, hide things in the dish washing machine until the guest leave. That has worked in the past. When it comes to the cupboards, I like things to be in the same place but I am not freakish about it.

I have a sister who would come by ever so often. If I leave her to clean the kitchen, I have to be calling her after to find out where she put what. Mind you when she cleans, it's with perfection. Outside of that, I get a little house help most weeks, so together we try to keep a system in place and that includes all the cabinets.

 

[Rosyrain]

My kitchen is generally clean. The countertops have minimal items stored on them and I scrub down the outside of the cupboards about once a week because they are white and get dirty easy. The inside of the cupboards are neat and orderly for the most part. The only cupboard in my kitchen that seems to be in constant disarray is the one in which I keep my plastic storage containers. I should keep the bowls and lids together, but they end up getting thrown in there with no real rhyme or reason.

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

I have set cabinets for set things. top right in the kitchen is all dried stuff - beans, lentils, pulses, powdered coconut milk.... top left of the same cupboard is jarred stuff such as date syrup, agave nectar, grape molasses, black strap molasses, coconut milk, tahini (various versions) peanut butter, cashew nut butter.... bottom right of that cupboard carries on with the dried pulses... bottom left is the stuff that is used an awful lot such as red lentils, hemp flour, red kidney beans, dried chickpeas etc which are in jars rather than anything else because I buy them in bulk. in the middle are nuts, dried fruit and a few other odds and ends. next cupboard over is completely devoted to spices on the lower shelf and dried herbs on the upper shelf.
down a left below the counter is baking stuff, flours of all sorts (hemp, potato, rice, self rising, plain, wholemeal, strong, spelt, gram flour etc.) along with numerous rices and pasta plus oddities such as arrowroot, xanthum gum, agar powder, baking powder, bicarb of soda, cream of tartar, proper vanilla essence... dark chocolate of all types and numerous versions of sugar including jaggery. over one more cupboard and you will find the oils, vinegars, soya sauces, pomegranate syrup (not sure why this never made its way to the other syrups though) and the very few tins we have (tomatoes and baked beans, plus to occasional tinned kidney beans). top shelf of that cabinet is fresh veg such as potatoes and squashes.

I doubt anyone else can find anything, I know my OH can't and I suspect I will spend months putting things back where they belong once I am back on my feet again and able to cook once more!

(We only have the one drawer, so that is easy - cutlery... but the layout is very clear. from left to right, knives, forks, spoons... easy really!