WHY are my kitchen cupboards overflowing?! *photos*

[ShakiraIsMyNameOnSaturday]

Please help! We have what I think is a reasonable number of kitchen cupboards - 11 cupboards and three drawers. Yet we are bursting at the seams! Everything is a disorganised mess.

What am I doing wrong? Do we have too much stuff?!?

Any suggestions that might help would be gratefully received.....

Umm...your kitchen cupboard look EXACTLY like mine. I figure it’s part of having a family of 3 - 6 (depending on the day) to feed.

Get yourself a glass of wine and stop stressing about it.

I say this as someone who cleaned her oven today. Seriously. Don’t sweat it.

Ooh, my kind of thread! I'll be back tomorrow with some photos of mine.,,

I hate cupboards for food. Lucky enough to have a small pantry where most of our food goes (6 of us including a bunch if teenagers). Drawers are loads better for cutlery etc when and if you remodel. When i had more cupboards they looked like yours. Pics: pantry, the lovely crockery drawer, and wall cupboard sample.

Some great storage ideas on here, thanks all for sharing!

I'm getting all my food into the cupboard that used to house my integrated fridge freezer.

So I'll have a big deep drawer spare. I can't decide cake tins or crocks.

Love your crockery old birdie

Audrey I bought a cheap set when I went to uni many years ago, on the grounds that it is always available to add to. Never goes out if fashion. I think I have one plate and one bowl from my original set 😂

Maybe try grouping like with like

Agree with pp to get rid of books etc to another location

Those Ikea variera are fab - I hv them

Declutter - remove EVERYTHING and only focus on what you really want to KEEP not what to discard

We have just accepted that the smallest cupboard will be where we shove crap out of the way. You take your life in your hands when you open it. The rest of the cupboards are therefore less cluttered. We have a tall pull out pantry cupboard for food and another really tall cupboard for things like mops and the vacuum cleaner. Ikea is brilliant for organisation ideas.

Oh, I have pantry envy oldbirdy!

I have a corner cupboard with boxes from Ikea that I can pull out and see what I've got.
When I moved house, I went through my kitchen cupboards ruthlessly, however, when my daughters put the stuff in npmy new cupboards, they threw loads more away that was massively out of date 😂
Now I have a good sort out of my cupboards every 6 months.
I have a plate rack in a base cupboard that allows me to stack all my plates vertically so I don't have to be forever moving plates to get to the ones I want.
Under my sink I have pull out bins for rubbish from Ikea, and also have them in the cupboard next to my washing machine with cleaning stuff and dog walking stuff. Because I can pull them out I can see everything.

Soon - were those pull out bins difficult to attach, from a DIY perspective?

For smaller things like baking ingredients and spices I use handled baskets like these. It's an Amazon link, mine actually came from Lakeland, and they are exactly the height of my shelves. Loose stuff like flour etc is decanted into boxes for easier stacking.
(not sure if the photo will work...)

Can’t you just buy a bigger house?

We bought a storage cabinet to store stuff in, we did keep it in the hallway as the kitchen was crowded. Something like this. www.john-lewis.co.uk/pantries
If you have space for a storage unit of some sort it may help. We have since had our kitchen renovated and a lot of storage added. I use the storage one for books now. Good luck.

when my daughters put the stuff in npmy new cupboards, they threw loads more away
Same, but was my dil who ruthlessly purged my over abundance of plastic containers and margarine tubs.

Those JL pantries are lush, don't need one, can't afford one and nowhere for it to go but oh I can dream.

Is pull everything out. It doesn't look organised sensibly. Also probably don't need all the different cleaning stuff under the sink. Put it on the counters and look at what logically goes together. Can dog food be stored elsewhere? Do you have a laundry or something or could go in? Easier juts to start from scratch and work it out that way.

The cupboards dont look that big and you have larger items like dog food and toaster inside them.

Can you move books to a shelf somewhere, ikea spice racks work well as thin kitchen recipe shelves.

Also try and downscale how may cleaning products. Can you have one item that can be used in several places instead of 2-3 different ones. I also keep the cleaning things where they are used, ie bathroom products in storage in bathroom, only kitchen items in kitchen.

Perhaps some decorative tea/coffee/sugar jars kept on the counter, that's one less thing in the cupboard.

I have OCD when it comes to my kitchen cupboards, everything facing forward and arranged in sections. It may appear to be a gruelling task but I'd personally advise you to pull everything out, decide where you want things to go (eg- bread cupboard, tins shelf, mugs shelf) and put it all back in. I'm sure along the way you'll find there's a lot you can get rid of.

Those IKEa stackers are brilliant def get those & even that lovely pantry would benefit !

Also take everything out & just assess how many of each thing you need, reduce your shopping to only buying a new packet when you are almost out of the previous one, don't stockpile.

Maybe the under the stairs glory hole could be decluttered by DH (just a bit) so you can store muilti packs of thing like beans & just have a couple actually in the cupboard?

OP your cupboards look a bit like mines....

Pull everything out.
You’ll most likely find that a lot of it is out of date or something that you have bought for one recipe and never used again. Bin stuff you don’t want.

Put the stuff you use most in the easiest spot to reach. Put the tins together, packets of dry stuff, like pasta together. Keep baking stuff in a different cupboard, you don’t need that quickly when cooking dinner.
Go through you cleaning stuff. Put the things you don’t need often, carpet spot cleaner for example, at the back, frequently used stuff at the front.
Can bathroom cleaning products live in the bathroom?

I agree with strawberrytraveller, you need to reduce the amount of cleaning products you have and store them where they are used, eg loo cleaner in the loo not in the kitchen.

A lot of what you have in the cupboard next to the cleaning products looks suspiciously like crap - you could reduce that by at least half.