The kitchen is one of the most important rooms in your home and needs to be kept in order. A dirty, cluttered kitchen is a source of chaos: no one wants to dig out a vegetable peeler or knife sharpener when the food is about to burn. This not only makes cooking much less stressful, but also safer. An organized and tidy kitchen reduces the risk of cuts, burns and other dangerous kitchen accidents, explains Auguste Escoffier of the Culinary Arts Institute.
This applies not only to the pantry, refrigerator, pots and pans, but also to cutlery and cutlery. In particular, your silverware drawer. It can be frustrating to open a cutlery drawer looking for forks, spoons, or kitchen utensils only to find a mess of metal. Despite your best efforts, your drawers will never be organized. Read on to make sure you don’t make these common silverware drawer organizing mistakes.
The first and most obvious mistake you can make when organizing your silverware drawer is not using drawer organizers. Even if you have a small drawer or some utensils, you should have them. Otherwise, you end up with a messy mess of spoons and forks of different sizes. If you have a knife, you also run the risk of accidentally cutting yourself.
The lack of a cutlery organizer also means cutlery takes up extra space in the drawers. Without a practical organizer, your cutlery will be stacked on top of each other instead of folded or slotted in as intended. Using organizers, you can create different categories and stack your appliances, creating more common space with EdgeWood Cabinetry. Depending on the model, you may be surprised to know that adding drawer organizers or dividers can hold more silverware and other small kitchen utensils than previously thought.
Large or oddly shaped silverware drawers are no reason not to use organizers. Ideally, every inch of your cutlery drawer should have some sort of organizer or divider so you can make room for less common supplies like spatulas, sharpeners, cleaning knives, etc. Don’t let them pile up in a clutter.
Container Store recommends expandable organizers for larger but well-shaped drawers. They stretch to cover the width of most drawers or shrink to fit small spaces. If you have a drawer that is oddly shaped or too big for an expandable organizer, consider a modular approach. This could mean adding a drawer divider to use in conjunction with regular organizers to fill the back and sides of drawers, or simply using a few small dividers for each item. Take care to fill in the gaps behind the organizer so that things are not accidentally pushed back and forgotten.
If you don’t have organizers or dividers in your drawers, you may run into the problem that the drawers often slip. In addition to being annoying, this is one of the ways that utensils that are not in the organizer can slip off and get lost. Many of these organizers have rubber stoppers on the bottom. However, if you don’t, there’s a good chance that acrylic, plastic, wood, or metal will get in the way every time you open or close the drawer.
That’s why Organized-ish recommends attaching the container to the surface of your drawer. First empty the drawer completely and then clean it thoroughly. Next, lay out each separator. Once you have a layout you like, use something to glue them together. You’d better choose something that won’t permanently change your drawers or leave a sticky residue that’s hard to clean. Consider using museum gel, which avoids both problems.
Drawer organizers are practically useless if you accidentally drop your cutlery in there. While there is no single correct way to use an organizer, some are undeniably better than others. Organized notes that most organizers have five slots that directly correspond to the five types of utensils sold in the set: large and small spoons, large and small forks, and butter knives.
However, you may have a more visible organizer or a small collection of tableware that will give you extra space. Do not try to fit large dishes into it. Instead, add thinner and smaller variety utensils such as reusable straws, chopsticks, smaller coffee or teaspoons, salad stands, corn grates, and more. From there, use large dividers to neatly store and organize large utensils like kitchen scissors, measuring cups and spoons, vegetable peelers, juicers, citrus juicers, garlic presses and more. Essentially, these are dishes that are too small to fit in a vertical countertop holder, but too big to fit in your regular organizer.
The last mistake you can make when organizing silverware is to try to put too many things in there. As long as the organizers help, there is little they can do. You need to prioritize the use of your essentials – spoons, forks, knives, various kitchen utensils – and reallocate larger tools (such as immersion blenders, large knife sharpeners, sieves, etc.) to other parts of your kitchen.
Fox Hollow Cottage recommends that one option for organizing these cluttered random items is to create a second drawer to organize your utensils. You can also store these items on your kitchen counter if you don’t have extra drawer space. Find a round, metal, or ceramic dish coaster and place them on a tray, or get creative and store them in baskets. Organizers recommend long, thin plastic or glass food storage containers that fit comfortably in kitchen cabinets or dining room cabinets.