Kitchen Space-Saving Ideas

More often than not, finding storage in busy workspaces at home is a challenge. This is certainly true of the busiest room in the house: the kitchen. We use the room on an almost constant basis - to store food, dinnerware, glassware and flatware, to store, prepare and cook food, to keep cleaning supplies, to dine in, to entertain in. The smaller the kitchen, the more challenging its organization becomes. These ideas below, from the editors of Martha Stewart Living, are ones that I have employed in my own kitchen (where appropriate) or ones that I have frequently suggested to friends who are struggling with kitchen storage. The ideas are delightfully simple - both in concept and execution. I hope you find them useful!
Here, you essentially create a two-tier storage system. Using a cake stand to corral and elevate frequently-used ingrdients, like spices and oils, keeps them within easy reach and frees up the counter space below the elevated tray to tuck in small canisters of other ingredients.

Two interlocking pieces of wood form an "X" within a wooden cubby, creating cubbies for wine storage.

Installing pegboard in the kitchen is a great way to hang baskets for extra storage. Using S-hooks to secure the baskets to the boards makes changing their positions a cinch. Baskets designed to hold fishermen's tackel or to secure to bicycle handlebars come ready-made with loops in the back.

A vintage bathroom towel bar finds a new use in the kitchen. Hanging pots and pans from S-hooks keep them within reach but still elevated from valuable surface area.

Storing cutting boards, baking sheets and sturdy platters upright on kitchen shelves frees space and saves you from having to lift a heavy stack simply to retrieve one item. Here, the editors used tension curtain rods, vertically, to create slots into which the boards can slide. Buy rods to fit the space and position pairs of them at intervals. Twist to tighten them.

Rather than stuff old rags and rubber gloves into a plastic bucket under the sink, hang them from hooks fastened to the inside of the cupboard doors. It keeps them handy and dry.

To eliminate the search for the right lid amid an unwieldly stack each time you use your pots and pans, store them neatly. Place a wooden peg rack inside a cupboard and line up the lids vertically between the pegs, from smallest to largest.

Gather the small pantry items you generally store on a cupboard shelf into a shallow baking pan then treat it like a drawer, carefully sliding it into view when you need to access an ingredient. This isolates numerous pieces into one spot, freeing up the shelf space around it. 

Bamboo steamers, used often in Asian cooking, lend themselves perfectly to the storage of onions and garlic. The air holes in the lid keep the produce cool and in a well-ventilated space while still keeping out the light - ideal storage for these frequently-used vegetables.

Storing glassware can consume a lot of valuable shelf space. Create a double-decker storage solution by using a small tray to double the surface area upon which to store the glasses.