Inside: A practical guide to your planning kitchen cabinets – including what to throw away, how to plan for repeated use, and one more thing that keeps you from returning to chaos.
Kitchen drawers are where good intentions go to die.
You open one looking for a spittoon and find seventeen pull-out menus, a dead battery, three pens that don’t work, and something you can’t really identify.
Sound familiar?
How to Organize Your Kitchen Drawers
The good news is that organizing kitchen drawers is one of the quickest wins around the house. No big furniture purchases, no weekend projects, no contractors needed. Just a little time, a little craziness, and maybe a pack of drawer dividers.
Here’s how to do it.
Start by Checking the Full Closet 🗂️
Before you organize anything, unpack everything.
Pull out one drawer completely and dump the contents on the counter.
You can’t plan what you haven’t actually seen – and most people don’t know what’s sitting in their kitchen cupboards until it’s all in front of them at once.
As you go through the pile, organize three sections:
- ✅ Save – things you use in the kitchen
- 🗑️ Throw it – broken tools, dead batteries, duplicates, mysterious things you haven’t touched in a year
- 📦 Move – items found elsewhere in the house entirely
Be cruel. If you have four spatulas and only have access to one, the other three take up space.
If you haven’t used an apple slicer since 2019, it’s no longer a kitchen tool – it’s clutter in the cupboard.
See our favorite kitchen cabinet organizers on Amazon.
🗃️ Junk Drawer — Give Program Instead of Deleting It
Here’s a controversial idea: the junk closet is fine.
Every house needs a place to hold everything – a place for things that don’t belong in any specific place but really need to be there.
The goal is not to empty the junk drawer. The goal is to activate instead of a black hole.
The problem is not the idea. Lack of any system within it.
Here’s what’s in the junk drawer:
- 🔋 Batteries
- ✂️ Scissors
- 📦 Tape
- 🖊️ Few pens really work
- 🍕 Take-out menus (or a notepad of phone numbers)
- 🔦 Small flashlight
- 💊 A basic first aid kit or a few bandages
Here’s what’s not in the junk drawer:
- Anything broken
- Anything you haven’t touched in six months
- Anything has a better home elsewhere in the house
A few small bins inside the closet – one for batteries, one for pens, one for everything else – just what’s needed to turn a messy junk drawer into something really useful.
Sort by Frequency of Use📊
Once you know what you’re saving, think about putting it away.
The drawers you reach for the most should hold the things you use the most. This sounds obvious – but most kitchens aren’t set up this way.
Here is a simple outline:
- Real estate (drawer near the stove or prep area) — everyday utensils, spittoons, wooden spoons, tongs, things you grab while cooking
- Second drawers (close but not perfect in practice) — measuring cups and spoons, kitchen shears, peelers, can openers
- Extra drawers (the ones you have to go to) — special tools, holiday baking, anything you use occasionally but not every day
When everything is within easy reach where you use it, cooking becomes significantly less boring.
And when things have a meaningful home based on how often they’re used, they tend to be put back where they belong – by you and everyone else in the house.
Practical Cabinet Divider System 🧹
Here’s why most kitchen drawers return to chaos during planning week: there are no dividers.
Without something to physically separate the sections, everything migrates. Spatulas end with measuring spoons. The scissors disappear under a pile of dish towels. The whole system is collapsing.
The separators are not negotiable. Here’s what you need to know before you buy:
Expandable bamboo dividers they are the most popular method and for good reason. They adjust to fit different cabinet sizes, look clean, and hold up well over time. They work best for dish drawers when you need to create several large sections.
Small plastic or acrylic containers work best for messy drawers and small items like batteries, twist ties, and pens. They’re easy to remove, easy to erase, and easy to rearrange if you change your mind.
One important rule before buying anything: measure your drawers first. Width, depth, and height. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming home with a nice set of organizers and finding out they’re a quarter inch too wide to fit. Rate twice, order once.
One Cabinet at a Time
Don’t try to do the whole kitchen at once.
It sounds like it’s working fine. It doesn’t work well. It leads to a kitchen that looks worse than when you started, a pile of things on the counter with nowhere to go, and an absolute desire to finish the project.
Instead: choose a single drawer. It did it perfectly. Give it back. Appreciate it for a moment – seriously, take a second – and decide if you want to do another one today or come back tomorrow.
The satisfaction of one well-organized closet is truly inspiring. It makes you want to do the next thing. And the next one.
One well-made drawer beats six half-done drawers every time.
Related: Spice Drawer Organization Ideas
Organized Kitchen Cabinets
Organized kitchen drawers are not about perfection.
They are all about getting scissors when they first try. It’s about opening a drawer and quickly seeing what you need instead of digging through a bunch of mystery stuff.
Pour it out. Plan ruthlessly. Put things where you actually use them. Add separators. Make one drawer at a time.
That’s the whole plan. And it works.
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