When you walk into your apartment’s kitchen, do you find dishes piled up in your sink, your cabinets filled with an explosion of Tupperware, and half of your knives M.I.A.? If yours is a small apartment, this predicament is understandable. Small apartment living is fraught with plenty of challenges when it comes to finding enough space in your apartment. Living and cooking in a small kitchen can be a challenge, especially if you’re not well-organized. You might even be discouraged from cooking altogether, since there might not be much room to slice, dice, or sauté in the first place. So what’s a small-apartment dweller to do? When it comes to small apartment living, even the messiest among us can make (pardon the pun) little changes that will make a big difference. Use these easy tricks and tools for small apartment living to turn your small kitchen into a clutter-free, cook-friendly zone.
It’s the Little Things
Don’t sweat the small stuff—hang it up instead! Oftentimes, teaspoons, mixer attachments, measuring cups, and other small cooking tools get thrown together into whatever small drawer is available in favor of making room for the big things in other drawers. Separate them and make them easy to access by using under-shelf hooks to hang up little cooking implements to eliminate mess. You can also put 3M-style hooks on the inside of kitchen cabinets to the same effect.
Dish It Out
Drying racks take up valuable counter space, so move those dishes up with a wall-mounted dish rack above the sink. They’ll drip-dry easily and out of the way. Suddenly, doing dishes by hand is much less annoying.
Hang Up
Put up a pegboard on a blank wall and use it to hang large cookware that won’t fit in any other cabinet. In fact, if you get creative, pegboards can be great for more than skillets. Rest your rolling pin on top of two well-spaced pegs, hang a basket up for smaller tools, or use individual pegs to hold up mugs and teacups.
Cutting Edge
Knives are really something you don’t want lying haphazardly in a drawer. Not only are they dangerous if you’re looking for a cleaver in a hurry, but all that jostling around can dull the blades. Get a magnetic knife strip and attach to your kitchen wall. Your knifes will stay safe and visible, and free up even more drawer space.
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