If you can get past the dopey title, read on. I have some super ideas on how to make the very best of a space-challenged kitchen.

And my first suggestion (and there’ll be no surprises here), is to go through all the stuff taking up residence in this crucial room and eliminate everything you don’t like, need, use, want, or have room for. I say “crucial” room because of everything that goes on there. A kitchen is a:

• Storage depot for food, utensils, and equipment
• Key work center for food preparation and cleanup
• Area in the home where food is most often eaten
• Social center
• Information center
• Office center
• Place to do homework
• Hobby center
• Small-scale canner
• Etc. etc. etc..

You can see, because of all the assignments the kitchen takes on, that it’s an easy room to overload. Your goal is to create user-friendly space. You want it to be fun and easy to work in.

Be brutally honest with yourself. And don’t hang onto anything just because you “paid good money for it.” Everything taking up space in a kitchen should earn it’s keep, no matter what it cost. And don’t hang onto things out of sentiment (same reason as above).

And please don’t hang onto anything because you think “you might need it some day.” I can tell you right now, it’s likely you WILL need it some day. But that’s not the point. There are people that need it TODAY. So find the courage and faith to pass that thing on to charity. And if you will, I can promise you that 1) either the good Lord will bless you with another of the same thing (typically better than the one you got rid of) in appreciation for your earlier generosity, or 2) you can go to your neighbor and borrow whatever it is you’re in need of. She’ll have 3 or 4 of ‘em. It’s America, after all…the land of PLENTY!

(By the way, keeping things because you might need them some day is the #1 reason people cling with a death-grip to things they don’t like, don’t need, don’t use, don’t want, or don’t have room for. Dumb way to live.)

OK, I’m off my soapbox. The second suggestion is mentioned in this article’s title. Hang as much as possible. Notice how many of our kitchen items come with a hole in the handle or a loop of some sort. This is so they can be hung, if need be. Hanging gets things out of drawers and off of shelves, freeing up precious space for other things that can’t be hung.

If you’re low on space, and want a more efficient kitchen, hanging is a terrific option. You can do this with those adhesive hooks found in hardware stores, you can pound tiny finish nails in at a sever angle (so they don’t puncture cupboard door), you can glue a clothespin to the inside of a cupboard door, and you can use screw hooks. For instance:

Hang from the insides of cupboard doors. Below you’ll see I’ve hung rubber gloves on the door underneath the kitchen sink. It’s smart to place things as close as possible to where they’ll be used. I glued a clothespin to the door. Works great.

This photo (below) shows our colander and strainers hung on the other door underneath the kitchen sink. You can see I used adhesive hooks for this. Again, they’re placed here because this is where I use them…at the sink.

And more hanging on the inside of a cupboard door: I cut away a large mailing envelope, placed my parchment paper in it, and hung it on the inside of the door of a cupboard underneath the counter where I do my baking. You can see I used packing tape to affix it to the door. Very handy.

And then, you can hang from underneath shelves. This works well for our mugs. Screw hooks do the job.

And hang on the inside of cupboards from their walls. Here I’ve hung my zester, placing it close to my box grater (which could also be hung, but it works OK where it is). The reason the zester is being hung and not stashed in a utensil drawer is just because it’s bulky and took up too much space. And it made sense to put the grater near it. It’s smart space organization to group and store like items together.

This is a great time of year to work on minimizing the stuff filling up your home. The kitchen is a smart place to start, and the benefits of moving things you don’t like, use, need, or have room for to charity are abundant (for others as well as yourself). So here’s to new-found space and more cook’n fun in 2021!