How to organise your kitchen during lockdown

Storing food and cleaning products, and organising your kitchen is a challenge these days. Here are some tips on how to organise your kitchen during quarantine.

How to organise the kitchen cabinets step by step

Organisation and planning are essential to stockpile food as well as hygiene, cleaning and disinfection products at home these days. Following the recommendations of the authorities to stay at home as much as possible, and go out to do the shopping once a week, we must plan the products we have, as well as the ones we are going to need, and the space we have to store them.

Empty all the kitchen cabinets to see what you have, what is missing and what you need.
Take advantage of the fact that you have emptied the cabinets to clean them on the inside.
Once they are clean, distribute the way you are going to organise the cabinets and make groups by product families, both for food and kitchenware.
Start putting things back in the cabinets.
Choose the area under the sink for the cleaning products. Put the most toxic ones at the back. Arrange them by families: floor cleaners, disinfectants, degreasers, dishwasher detergents, WC cleaners, drain cleaners... you can use boxes to store them. This will also allow you to see the amount of products you have, and those you need.

Use the drawers to organise your cutlery and kitchenware.
- Use the first drawer for your daily cutlery.
- The second drawer for the different kitchen utensils
- The third drawer for kitchen cloths and protective oven gloves.
- The fourth drawer for aprons and kitchenware that you use every day.
- The last drawer for all types of cleaning cloths and rags. We can sort them by type of fabric and colour for each surface and room.
- If we have more drawers, we can leave one drawer as a spice rack, another one to keep the bread and chopping board, another one for pastry products, another one for tablecloths...

Choose the lower cabinets closer to the cooking area to store frying pans, pots and ovenproof dishes. Stack them according to size from largest to smallest and leave the ones you use every day in the shallowest part.
Store the dishes, plates and glasses you use each day in one of the upper cabinets. The best option is to leave the plates and dishes on the bottom shelf and the glasses on the top shelf, as they weigh less.
The crockery you use the least should be kept in one of the cabinets furthest away from the cooking and cleaning area. This includes cups and glasses.
Leave a cabinet in the lower part to store small appliances such as toasters, coffee makers... that you usually use, but you don't want to leave on top of the kitchen counter.

Organise the pantry, this is the most complicated moment:
- Protect the shelves from stains with a non-slip plastic material that can be cleaned with a damp cloth.
- Distribute the food well: the heaviest in the lower area of the pantry: bottles and carafes of water, milk cartons, cans of soft drinks, ... And put what you use more at eye level.
- Use jars, if possible made of glass, to store pasta, rice, vegetables, flour... everything that comes in packages. This way, you will avoid opening packages that could spill their content. You will need 3 sizes, large for pasta and rice, medium for flour or sugar, and small for nuts.
- Use labels to put the expiry date on the jars.
- For each product, have one package opened and another to be opened. Every time you open a package, you know you have to replace it.
- Sort from the newest to the oldest. The oldest in front and the newest behind in order of expiry date.
- Use boxes or containers to store by food group or by cooking time. For example, we can put everything we use for breakfast, all the vegetables, the cans of preserves, inside a box, ...
- Use the area under some of your cabinets to store potatoes, onions, garlic and anything else that shouldn't be in the fridge. Separate them into boxes or containers.