The Best Martha Stewart Tips To Declutter Your Kitchen

If you're the type of person who is constantly in your kitchen, preparing and cleaning up three meals a day, then you know just how easily things can start to get messy, cluttered, and chaotic. Kitchens are one of the most-used spaces in the majority of households, so it's important that functionality takes precedent over aesthetics. The expert of all things homemaking, Martha Stewart, believes an ideal kitchen doesn't have to be fancy. "Kitchens are workspaces! Practicality above all else," she told Frederic Magazine in a 2020 interview. Of course, the more organized you get, the more pleasing to the eye the space will naturally become.

However, finding perfect spots for all of the clutter is one of the hardest things to do when tidying up the kitchen. Not having enough storage space is the thing renovators most often regret when it comes to remodeling their kitchens, as Stewart has noted on her YouTube channel. It's important to take the time to organize your kitchen every few months in order to have a functioning space to cook in. Decluttering and finding creative storage solutions is key. Martha Stewart has more than a few tips to share on that front.

Martha Stewart loves copper cookware for its amazing heat conductivity and its aesthetic appeal. Over the decades, she has collected an impressive amount of antique copper pots and pans that date back to as early as the 1700s. Not only does Stewart love to hang these pots to create a beautiful display, but it's also better for the longevity of the cookware. While it may be your first instinct to stack your pans on top of each other to save space, inevitably, that may cause damage.

Instead of stacking, the homemaking mogul suggests hanging them. "I like the accessibility of the hanging pots. You can see what you have and which pot you need for the specific job at hand, and grab it. It's very hard to use an under-counter space to store pots because they have to be stacked and they're in small areas and then you have to take everything out to get what you need," she told Frederic Magazine. Hanging your pots not only prevents damage but can also save you cabinet space and time, making it one of Martha Stewart's most useful tips for streamlining your kitchen. There are several ways to go about hanging them, including installing a rail with hooks, a wall-mounted rack, or a ceiling-mounted rack.

Harder-to-reach cabinets often go unused because of their inaccessibility. "The space above your refrigerator is another space that oftentimes just goes unused. Store items up there that you don't use as often," Martha Stewart explained in a video posted on her YouTube channel. For instance, perhaps you rarely bring out the ice bucket except on special occasions when champagne is served, so why not keep it out of sight until the occasion to use it arises? Or maybe you can move that one gravy boat that only gets used on Thanksgiving, the egg-shaped deviled egg dish that only makes an appearance on Easter, or the tiered tea tower that you perhaps only bought for that one tea party you threw many years ago.

Of course, it's important to avoid hoarding items that are outdated, broken, or that you may never use again, so the first step is to go ahead and get rid of any items that you truly don't need. After that, reassess the items you have sitting on the countertops and in lower cabinets. Store the ones you rarely use (but still need to keep for specific occasions) on the top shelves or even on top of the cabinet, out of sight.

It's tempting to throw everything into the same drawer and cram things wherever they fit, but continually doing this will inevitably lead to lots of clutter. For Martha Stewart, keeping like items together is a rule of thumb for organizing everything from your pantry to your junk drawer. "Group like items together. For example, store all your baking supplies in the same cabinet," she explained on her YouTube channel. Even Stewart's junk drawer is organized by keeping similar items together. She suggests finding small containers and trays that fit in the drawer and putting all of your first aid items in one, your pens and notepads in another, clips and pins in one, etc. This way, even the chaos of the miscellaneous items seems manageable.

If you don't have the counterspace for a knife block, Stewart has also noted that a designated knife drawer is especially important. Loose knives in drawers are not only dangerous but can make cutlery drawers cluttered. According to Stewart, the most efficient way to organize a knife drawer is from smallest to largest, and use a knife dock drawer insert made of cork.

Storing things vertically often saves space and makes it easier to find items as opposed to stacking them on top of one another. This is especially true for items like sheet pans and baking trays. To easily create customizable storage spaces, Martha Stewart has come up with an unconventional, innovative, and affordable way to create a custom cabinet: tension rods. During a segment for TODAY, she explains, "Vertical storage makes the most of the cupboard. These are just expandable curtain rods ... You can buy those in any hardware store."

To create this look yourself, shop for thin tension rods made for things like cafe curtains and line up several vertically in a row as dividers. Easily wipe them down with your preferred method of sanitation before loading your kitchenware in them. Another great way to use tension rods for storage is to place them horizontally in the cabinet beneath the sink to hang spray bottles. There are a lot of possibilities for incorporating tension rods in your kitchen in surprising ways, so don't be afraid to be like Martha Stewart and think outside the box.

Storage containers don't necessarily need to be the most basic glass ones that are commercially produced. Take a page out of Martha Stewart's book and get creative with using thrift store finds and antique items. Stewart loves using odd antiques in unexpected ways. For example, in an old clip from her television show posted on Instagram, she's seen giving a tour of her pantry room. Stewart explains that she collects vintage canning jars and shows how she uses old refrigerator jars to store infused sugar. She also loves collecting antique crocks to place her utensils in.

Even Martha Stewart's trash can is far from boring and has a story behind it. Instead of your typical stainless steel bin, she's opted for an antique barrel. "We're always looking for garbage pails for the kitchen. And I have only one in this kitchen and it is an old pickle crock," she said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning as she happily demonstrated her inventive use of the vintage item. 

You might be surprised by just how much the store-bought plastic packaging (that items like grains, pasta, dried beans, flour, and sugar come in) contributes to the cluttered look of your pantry. Food packages get stacked, thrown on top of each other, and may get hidden and then forgotten about, leaving you with duplicates and expired items. To create a more streamlined look in the pantry, Martha Stewart always empties her store-bought dry goods into glass jars. "Another nice thing to do to keep your pantries looking organized and keep your groceries a little bit fresher is to — I call it decanting — but it's really putting it from plastic bags ... into a nice container," she told CBS Sunday Morning.

Stewart adds that it's important to choose jars and containers that have tight-fitting lids to create a tight seal, which will prevent spoilage more efficiently than keeping the items in the original packaging. Not only will putting this tip into practice make your space look less cluttered, but it will also be much more aesthetically pleasing. Just don't forget to label each jar with a name and date.

All of those stacks of dish towels and dinner napkins stuffed into drawers and cabinets can get messy quickly. Martha Stewart makes sure to designate a drawer to her ready-to-use dinner linens, but instead of folding, she rolls them. To achieve this, she has a handy tip: Save your paper towel rolls and use them for rolling the towels and napkins instead. "I love having freshly ironed napkins to put on the table for dinner parties. And use your paper towel rolls — don't throw these away — to just roll up your ironed napkins. This is so easy to do," she notes in a video on her YouTube channel.

Per her instructions, you can roll several on one roll for even more storage. Not only does this make the drawer look tidier, but it also allows you to see all of your options for easy access and keeps them wrinkle-free. With perfectly crisp dinner napkins, you're ready to set your dinner table like a pro.

If you're someone who loves organizational retailers like The Container Store, then you aren't alone. Store-bought organizational tools are an easy and affordable way to help make sense of the chaos of the kitchen. Martha Stewart loves inserts like pegboard drawer organizers to stop bowls from clanking and getting banged up. She's also a big fan of placing store-bought vertical tray dividers under the cabinet to make storing sheet pans a breeze.

Lots of spice jars stuffed into a cabinet can make it hard to find the spices you need, and the common tiered racks take up a lot of space in cabinets that could be used for larger items. Instead, Martha suggests assigning a drawer to your spice collection and shopping for slanted drawer racks for more efficient storage. "Spices stay fresher and longer when kept out of the sunlight so this kind of storage is really really excellent for spices and for herbs," she notes on her YouTube channel.

A messy workspace and an inadequate amount of counter space can quickly make making dinner a more difficult task. In order to ensure you have plenty of space for chopping, prepping, and mixing your ingredients, keep counter spaces as clear and clean as possible. To maintain a streamlined counter space, Martha Stewart suggests keeping large wooden spoons and ladles in crocks. Using a cake stand to lift countertop essentials to get them out of the way is another one of Stewart's tricks to keep the space looking tidy.

If you have a particularly small kitchen, she suggests using floating shelves — a kitchen tip also recommended by Ree Drummond — to create a sort of second counter space for storing those countertop items like your most-used spices and olive oils. "In a small kitchen, countertop space is very limited. Adding a shelf takes items off the counter and puts them up here," she said in a video posted on the Martha Stewart YouTube channel. She suggests mounting the shelf 22 inches above the counter as opposed to the standard 18 inches to give yourself plenty of headspace to work in.

Those who are minimalists when grocery shopping may find their refrigerator shelves are never fully stocked. Modern refrigerators are large, clunky appliances that don't necessarily serve every household. While they're perfect for larger families and folks who make every meal at home, it may be that a single household or someone who often goes out to dinner or makes more frequent market runs can get away with a smaller appliance.

If you have a smaller kitchen with limited counter and storage space, Martha Stewart says it's perfectly fine to opt out of the standard refrigerator and switch to a smaller model to free up more space. "[If] you don't want to have a big refrigerator standing, taking up all that wall space, put in an under-counter refrigerator. These are so handy," she explained in a video on her YouTube channel. The small refrigerator she shows is disguised as a drawer, making it especially seamless in the design flow of the kitchen, but a small traditional-style refrigerator would work in most spaces as well. Then use that extra space to extend the countertop or place more shelves for storage.

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