by Julie Spaur

Created on: July 29, 2011

Is your kitchen so small you can flip pancakes and do the dishes at the same time? If there are more than two people in the room, does the oxygen start to get thin?  Do you dream of having just a sliver of counter space to work on, but find your counter covered in dishes, clean and/or dirty, small appliances and random pantry items that don’t fit in your pantry simply because you don’t have a pantry?  If you suffer from small kitchen-itis, there is still hope for you to have a neat, user friendly, charming room with a little effort and a lot of imagination.  

A great way to start is to think “downsizing.”   Go through the pantry, drawers and cupboards and if you find anything that you haven’t used in 6 months to a year, you probably don’t need it.  Donate items to a charity or thrift store, and if any edibles are still within their shelf life, donate them to a food pantry.   This step is often the hardest if you have packrat or hoarding tendencies, so start small.   You might try this over a course of time and find that while you are reluctant to part with very many things the first time, you actually feel better once you do and are more ready to go through again with more of an open mind about getting rid of even more stuff.

If you are downsized as far as you can downsize and just don’t have enough room for the things you really need, a good way to approach organization is to think outside the box.  Or, to be more specific, think outside the kitchen.  Are there things that you don’t use very often that are taking up precious space where you need it most?  If that is the case, maybe you have room in a spare closet, basement shelf or bedroom to store rarely used items.  If you only make bread two or three times a year, but are constantly tripping over the breadmaker or the bread pans, it would make more sense to store them in the empty space at the back of your clothes closet for the majority of the time and use the space in the kitchen that was freed up for something you more frequently use.  Use the same mentality for canned goods if you tend to stock up.  Maybe you have an area under the stairs in the basement that can be turned into a pantry area for extra items, and only keep two or three items in the kitchen as you need them. 

Now that there is a bit more elbow room in your small kitchen, it is time to turn it into a

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