38 | Your Kitchen Today, Your Way
38 | Your Kitchen Today, Your Way
Welcome to Episode 38, where we're about to embark on a journey into the heart of your home: your kitchen.
From bill paying to meal prep, homework to socializing, we'll explore the wide range of activities that unfold in this vital space. We use our kitchens for much more than cooking these days, yet deep down many of us are holding on to traditional beliefs around cooking, family dinners, and kitchen dynamics. I’ll share how this can cause unnecessary suffering.
Join me as I encourage you to explore your kitchen standards and break down those hidden obstacles. I’ll also give you practical advice to tailor your kitchen to your current lifestyle. You’re more organized than you think.
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Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing an Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy, and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household, and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 38, Your Kitchen Today, Your Way.
My mother didn’t love to cook. When I was young, she prepared food out of necessity, and she had a weekly routine that worked. She was a huge fan of the frozen delivery service Schwan's and loved a good Crock Pot meal. Our freezer was stocked full of meats and prepared foods that she could easily turn into dinners for the four of us. My mother always said that Home Economics class didn’t ring true for her, and that her sister Vickie got the bulk of the home management skills in their family.
Their mother suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and struggled with mobility. My grandfather cooked a few times a week – a rarity in the 1950s – and home cooked meals were also delivered by a family friend named Mrs. Swimm. I have distinct memories of the classic green Corningware dishes and cabinets in my grandparents’ home. Their kitchen was simple and small, with a breakfast table and small desk nook within, and a slightly larger dining room adjacent. Meals were also simple, and more often tailored towards the adults than kids.
Many of the kitchens I see today are sizable. They’re made for hosting events. They’re often overstocked with more appliances than are used on a regular basis. I think we’d all agree that kitchens have become central to the family home. They’re multi-use and multi-function: we use them to pay bills, do homework, hang out together, prep for the day and decompress when it’s done. They’re now used for way more than meal prep and cooking. They’ve also become paper piling centers and storage spaces for serving dishes and extra sets of dining ware that have been passed down through generations. Oftentimes there are too many items in our kitchens for the way we’d ideally like them to function.
So, on today’s episode, I’ll encourage you to think about your kitchen through the lens of how you currently use it. You’ll set aside the standards and expectations of how your kitchen should be used, and instead consider its design from the way you actually use it. Then you can best decide how to declutter and adjust the space. Your kitchen can work for your benefit and be a space that’s comfortable, functional, and welcoming. I’ll then make a few suggestions to help you improve the usage of space so that you can maximize its design.
I share the story of my mother’s approach to cooking, because the way you were raised subtly (or loudly) influences what you believe a kitchen is for and how it should feel. If you grew up with regular home cooked meals, you may carry a belief that that’s the gold standard for a home. If you grew up with the kitchen being a flurry of energy – a place where folks were always coming and going, and everyone was responsible for feeding themselves from a young age – that experience may influence your perception of the kitchen. If you grew up always gathering in the kitchen on the weekend for long bouts of after religious service cooking or multi-generational holiday meal preparations, again that story of how a kitchen should be used may be floating in the back of your psyche.
Your past influences what you think about your space, and it’s helpful to understand what standard you may be judging yourself against today. I learned to cook out of enjoyment, but also because my mother didn’t explicitly teach me. I taught myself out of necessity, and now I’ve taught my kids. I rarely freeze meals. I don’t enjoy hosting large events, even though I’m capable, so I’ve consciously decluttered many of my large serving pieces.
So, take a moment to consider what you think your kitchen’s primary function should be. What was your experience with cooking, entertaining, and gathering in the kitchen growing up? Today, your kitchen is most likely one of the top 2 used spaces in your home. Perhaps it’s even open-plan and can be utilized alongside other rooms. No matter what, it’s a high traffic space.
Next, I invite you to pause and think through the top 5 activities that take place in your kitchen each week. Options include homework, eating breakfast (or dinner), chatting + connecting, bill paying, food preparation, cleaning dishes, cooking, cleaning cookware, packing to-go meals, watching tv, taking work calls… The list is endless. Be as honest with yourself as possible. Rank the activities in order of actual usage. If you cook a lot, put that high on your list. If you mainly hang out there, put that high on your list.
I’m curious if you’re surprised by how many activities you complete in your kitchen. I’m also curious as to whether your actual usage is in line with how you’re telling yourself the space should be used. For example, lots of my clients are bothered by the paper piles in their kitchens. However, if you process mail, paperwork, and pay bills in the kitchen, it makes sense that there are piles of papers in the kitchen. You either may not have a home office or you may have a routine of dropping things on the kitchen counter before the papers ever make it to the office. Oftentimes our dissatisfaction or low-lying irritation with our homes comes from the inner conflict between how we think our space should be used versus how we actually use it. Relief comes from aligning your usage with your thinking or from noticing the small moments where your habits could be adjusted in the future.
My children often do their homework in the kitchen, and this works for me. I’d encourage them to bring their backpacks to the counter, accomplish what needed to be done, then re-pack their backpack and place it by the back door. I also kept a cabinet of most often used school supplies in the kitchen. Art and craft supplies, however, were kept elsewhere. I set a limit or a boundary around how many office-type supplies were available in the kitchen. Anything above and beyond the basics – those items were housed elsewhere.
Consider your family’s routine. Think through whether there are clear rules about what items belong in the kitchen and what items don’t. If not, this may be an area you want to explore, and don’t hesitate to poll your house mates on their thinking (or lack thereof). Kitchens do have the potential to become dumping grounds for all types of items, if you or your family members are unclear about what’s allowed in and what’s not. Thinking through your guidelines is a simple, small consideration that will change what’s allowed to land in or stay in the kitchen. Encouraging others to keep these boundaries in mind and to follow through putting items away will save you a headache and tidying minutes later.
When clients come to me for home organization skills and systems, one of the things we do together is take the time to think through what’s currently happening then deciding what parts warrant change. Don’t underestimate the importance of pausing to think through how you use your kitchen and what features about it could improve. This is one quality that separates more organized folks from those who desire more organization – having taken the time and energy to intentionally decide. You can do this too. I’ll remind you to beware of any self-judgment or criticism that may show up. It’s not about the decisions that got you to now; it’s more about what you want for the future.
For example, the same thought applies to bill paying and paperwork. IF this is one of the top functions of your kitchen, give yourself permission to set up a station. Let me repeat - give yourself permission to do paperwork in the kitchen. Make it simple or make it fancy. Place a tray for paperwork and a letter sorter for mail supplies. Designate a space for bill paying and paperwork with intention rather than telling yourself that you SHOULD be doing it elsewhere. This alone will provide relief and make things easier. Instead of requiring yourself to move paperwork into another room, process it where it lands. This cuts out an extra step that’s a hidden obstacle to opening mail and paying bills.
Another hidden obstacle I see in the way folks use their kitchens is not adapting the kitchen cabinet and shelving to meet your needs. Remember, builders build kitchens in a standardized fashion, however, you get to customize your shelving, cabinets, and drawers to work for you. Alright. So, I’m 5’2” tall which is pretty short. I often need a step stool when it comes to using my kitchen. Whenever I move into a new kitchen, the first thing I do is adjust the height of the shelves in the cabinets and pantry. Did you know that you can do this? Seriously, check your cabinets. Most of them have pegged holes where you can raise or lower the height of the internal shelves. Lots of folks miss this, and I shift the shelving to ensure that the extra space floats higher to the top of the cabinet and that I can reach items more easily. I store less frequently used items on those shelves I can’t reach.
I also use shelf risers to add space to lower cabinets too. Instead of stacking pots and pans and having lots of space above the cookware, I separate the empty space by adding a shelf to the cabinet. There are lots of tips and tricks out there offered by professional organizers, so I’m not going to outline them here, but what I do want to emphasize to you is that it’s your kitchen. Make it work for you rather than against you. You’re more organized than you think.
If you have wire shelving in a closet and it frustrates you, line it with a heavy plastic shelf liner. If your under the sink area is kind of yucky, add some lighting, declutter what you don’t use frequently, add some water-resistant liner, and utilize the vertical space. It’s not about doing these things all at once, it’s about picking one area that’s been rubbing you the wrong way and solving it. It will eliminate that low buzzing that happens in your mind (aka mental clutter) that pops up when you’re in your kitchen. Many of us get stuck in our old habits and ways of being so much so that you allow the irritation to go unchecked rather than choosing to believe that a dedicated hour on a project will make an impactful difference.
Lastly, if you have an ADHD brain, optimizing the function of your kitchen and giving yourself permission to use it the way you’re currently using it is essential. One common feature of ADHD is that seeing what you have is critical. And that means, in most kitchens, to see what you have you have to pare down tremendously. Less of everything – less items in the pantry, less packaging and overstock, less extra gadgets, and fewer tools. There’s a benefit to us all to buying less and buying only what you’ll use and consume in the next two weeks. We live in a society where you can get paper towels and pantry items on demand through delivery, yet our storage habits haven’t caught up with this instant availability. With ADHD, overstock and overabundance will work against your brain. Aim to have two at most of each item in your pantry at a time. Remove less frequently used items to another area of your home or work to use what you have before allowing yourself to buy more. You’re more thinking about the immediate than the future, so make your kitchen work for now. It will relieve a little bit of that executive functioning load.
Your kitchen is YOURS. Treat it in accordance with how much time you spend in it. If it’s the top one or two rooms in your house, it may deserve a bit more of your attention and energy so that it can return that back to you with the reward of calm and ease of flow. Embracing an organized life happens one cabinet, station, drawer, zone at a time. Pausing, becoming aware of how you think and feel about space, then identifying where your control lies is always the first step. There are always multiple metrics that you can change when it comes to your kitchen: you can shift your expectations, you can practice buying less, you can declutter what’s outdated or unused, you can set boundaries on what belongs and what doesn’t, you can hold others accountable, you can fiddle with the design of a space… I could go on. You have options, and once you find one that lights you up, go for it. Trust that your way of using your kitchen is the right way. Talk to y’all soon.
Outro: Hey y'all, I'd be honored if you'd take three minutes to leave a review of this podcast. Your time is precious and by leaving a review, A Pleasant Solution will reach more listeners and lives. I'd also love to hear your feedback and share your review on a future episode. Talk to y'all soon and remember, you’re more organized than you think.
