For years my husband and I lived in a large home with a gigantic kitchen. Not only did our kitchen have an entire wall of cabinets and a big fridge, but we also had two large pantries and a second, smaller fridge for drinks. It was just the two of us living in the house, so we had all the space in the world to store stockpiles of groceries.
When we moved in to our RV for our cross country excursion, I knew it would be a big adjustment for multiple reasons. One of the biggest was that we would be downsizing our kitchen to a couple small cabinets for dishes, a mini fridge, and a small overhead cabinet that we affectionately called our “pantry.” We recently relocated again, this time to an apartment. While the kitchen is bigger than the RV, it’s still nowhere near as big as our house’s kitchen. I’ve had to create new habits around these smaller kitchen spaces. Whether you are moving in to a smaller home, or are just going a little nuts in your current home, I hope these tips can help you function better in a tiny kitchen.
1.) Plan Your Meals
No matter what size your kitchen, planning your meals is one of the best ways to keep your kitchen organized and free of clutter. When you’re in a smaller kitchen, it’s essential. In a larger kitchen you can stock up on staples when they go on sale, in the hopes that you will use them some day. If you have a tiny kitchen, you don’t have that luxury. Because there storage is at a premium, you need to make sure you use up items as quickly as you bring them in. The easiest way to do that is to plan your meals. If you have items in your cabinets, plan your meals around the items you want to clean out. Whether it’s boxed rice mixes, or cans of vegetables, search online recipes that can help you use those ingredients in a timely manner.
2.) Shop Twice a Week
While we were in the house, I would plan my meals once a week. On Sundays I would sit down, write out 7 meals for the week, make a list of ingredients we needed to make all those meals, and grocery shop one time a week. I’d also add items that were on super special to my list and stock up on those items when they were on sale. My pattern has changed slightly now that we have significantly less storage in our kitchen.
Instead of meal planning and shopping once a week, I now do it twice a week. By doing this, I only have 3 or 4 days of ingredients in my kitchen at a time. We still save money by eating most meals at home, but I break the week up in to two planning and shopping sessions. The added bonus to shopping twice a week is that I can occasionally take advantage of extra savings. When I shop on the weekends, I might see an unadvertised in-store sale happening that I can plan a meal around later in the week. When I return for my second shopping trip, I grab the sale items knowing that I now have room for them in my cupboards or fridge.
3.) Ditch the Packaging
No matter what size your kitchen, I would encourage you to ditch the boxes that many food items come in. Rice, cereal, granola bars, and more will take up significantly less space in your cupboards when they are out of the box. I like to use sealed storage containers to store items in my kitchen. For things like rice, I use clear boxes with chalkboard labels. Immediately when I get home from shopping, I pour the rice from the store packaging in to my containers. This way I know exactly how much I have in my cupboard, and it looks much more neat and tidy.
Granola and breakfast bars can take up a lot of space if they are kept in their individual boxes. If you remove them and store them in a long basket, you can immediately see how many you have left, pick the one you want to eat that day, and know when it’s time to buy more. You can’t do that with any food you keep hidden in cardboard boxes.
4.) Get Creative with Storage
The last grocery tip for tiny kitchens is to get creative with your storage. When I was in our house with a gigantic pantry, I had the shelves stocked like a grocery store, with lots and lots of boxes on one shelf, stacks of cans on another shelf, and entire shelf dedicated to baking supplies. Since that was definitely not able to happen in the RV, we started to get creative with how and where we stored food. One example of this is that we would store all our fruit in a bag in our sink. When we would travel, the fruit would stay put, but when we needed to use the sink, we’d pull out the bag and run the water.
Tiny kitchens are nothing to be afraid of, so long as you invest a little planning and get creative.
In our apartment, we have enough room that we don’t need to store food in the sink, but you can be darn sure that we are using every other nook and cranny we have available. We have a large bowl on top of our fridge that we keep our fruit and another that stores our potatoes and onions. We have many of our small appliances, like the crock pot, hand mixer, and food processor stored on top of the cabinets so it keeps the cabinets open for food items. We have even used the small space on top of our stacked washer and dryer (which are also located in our small kitchen) for extra food items on occasions. If you have a tiny kitchen, you may even consider buying extra storage items, like a rack of baskets to store fruits and vegetables, a small cart to store pots and pans, or wall mounted hanging shoe organizers to store pre-packaged items. If you look up, down, and all around in your tiny kitchen, you may be surprised at how much storage space you can create!
While a big kitchen may seem like an enviable thing in a home, there are some advantages to having a small kitchen. It’s easier to keep clean, you can get everything done without having to do laps around a big kitchen island, and you’re less likely to buy duplicates and triplicates of kitchen gadgets. Plus, it may be hard to believe, but I can attest that you can create the same meals in the tiniest of kitchens. This year I proved that by hosting Thanksgiving dinner at our apartment! Tiny kitchens are nothing to be afraid of, so long as you invest a little planning and get creative.
This will be my last month as the Domestic CEO. If you’d like to keep up with me, and even see some examples of the meals I cook in my tiny kitchens, make sure to follow me on Instagram. That’s where I post updates on my personal adventures of being a business owner, new mom, and lover of all things domestic!
Until next time, I’m the Domestic CEO, helping you love your home.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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