Five Ways to Streamline Your Kitchen for Christmas
Christmas – it’s the most wonderful time of the year; is it not? That is, however, until you find yourself running out of counter space preparing the lovely Christmas dinner and forgetting where you’d hidden those festive treats. Add this to the regular hectic nature of the festive season and you’ll soon be tearing your hair out!
In the interest of helping you keep your hair very much on your head, we’ve put together five ways to get a streamlined kitchen in time for Christmas. No one needs the extra stress of an under-equipped kitchen.
Read on…
Make Use of Vertical Space
We get it. It’s easy to plop appliances and dinnerware right on the shelf or the countertop, but doing so makes use of only one flat surface.
To reduce clutter, put your things into tall storage units or wall-mounted shelving. Hang wire baskets off the sides of your counters as a place to store things like dish towels, pot holders, and grocery bags. Rather than pile things one on top of another, you can install file dividers into your cupboard to help stack pots and pans. Not only will your kitchen be more streamlined by Christmas, but your guests will be impressed by how neat and aesthetically pleasing the place looks. Score!
Hang It Up
Your kitchen will end up looking tidier and pleasing to the eye when you hang things up. You can put wall hooks to hang utensils and baking supplies, so you’ll no longer have to dig through a messy drawer to find them. When your pots and pans are hanging right in front of you, you’ll be able to find them much more easily.
Pegboards are a fun, alternative way of storing things. If you have a big blank wall in your kitchen, consider putting up a pegboard to hang most, if not all, of your utensils within easy reach. We love this DIY pegboard building and hanging tutorial by The Kitchn. Once you have a pegboard hanging in your kitchen, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without one!
Create Work Zones
If you want to streamline the food preparation process, take a page from restaurants’ books and assign different zones throughout your kitchen. For example, you can have a cleaning zone (sink, dishwasher, dish rack, etc.), a food prep zone (chopping board, measuring cups, food scale, etc.), a cooking zone (stove, oven, slow cooker, etc.), and a serving zone (plates, bowls, place mats, etc.). The Christmas dinner you’ve been sweating about will be so much easier when you’ve planned it all ahead.
Organise Your Food Items
How does your fridge look? If you can barely close the freezer door, or if you have six different cheeses jostling for room in the dairy compartment, then you need to set aside a day for Christmas cleaning (spring cleaning, except less of a job!).
Make food storage easier with boxes and containers, instead of keeping items in their original packaging. Additionally, don’t just toss everything into the fridge or cupboard with little thought. Think of it like Tetris: you want to maximise space while also keeping things neat. Do like your local grocery does and keep like food items together.
Pre-Measured Ingredients
Scrambling to make the Yorkshire pudding but find that you don’t have enough flour? Don’t let this happen to you! Look no further than the genius of pre-measured ingredients. It’s up to you how you interpret this: either you create multiple ‘meal kits’ with measured-out ingredients that follow a recipe, or you keep the ingredients you know you’ll use well-stocked. A checklist will help you avoid any last-minute panic.
So there you have it! We hope your kitchen’s looking and working a lot smoother. Do you have any other ways you get your kitchen streamlined and prepped for Christmas? Let us know in the comments below.