House Tour: Small Organized Kitchen + How to Make Shelves Appealing

Our family of five (almost six) lives in a relatively small cottage in rural New Zealand with a detached bonus storage/guest bedroom. The small, organized kitchen is one of our most-used spaces in our home since we cook most of our meals from scratch. We also started homeschooling our oldest child last year, so the bar tends to double as our main homeschooling location. Although the space isn’t huge, we have everything we feel like we need, and it is laid out in a way that functions for us nicely.

This small, organized kitchen has about three times the counter space of the kitchen in our previous home, so it feels quite luxuriously large to me! I especially love how it is open to the main common space of our house. With three relatively small kids in our family, it’s nice to be able to work in the kitchen and keep an eye on the activities happening!

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Some statistics on our home:

• 650 square feet (60 square meters) + bonus bedroom building of about 100 square feet (10 square meters) = 750 square feet liveable space (70 square meters)
• 2 bedrooms/1 bathroom + detached bonus room
• Open Concept Living/Dining/Kitchen areas
• Time lived here: 2 years
• Ages of our kids: 6, 3, and 1
• Kitchen Dimensions: 9 ft 2 in x 10 ft 11 in (281cm x 332cm)

In this post I’ll walk you through our small kitchen, including how we organize and store our cooking equipment and our homeschooling/home command center area, with pictures so you can visualize it clearly. Since our kitchen is relatively small and we cook a lot, we’ve had to strike the balance between having what we need and also trying to keep it visually appealing. Our home has a lot of open shelves in it, so it’s a constant effort to maximize the shelf storage while also not creating absolute visual chaos. This post will show you how we’ve tried to walk that line!

My favorite things about our small, organized kitchen:

• I love that it is open to the common area with a bar. The bar space is not only my main work zone, but it is also where the kids hang out a lot. It brings a lot of connectivity to our home.
• The big window above the kitchen sink looks out onto our deck and over a kiwi fruit orchard. When I have laundry hanging, I don’t always have as lovely of a view, but it still allows a lot of daylight and a sense of open space into the dish-washing zone.
• I love how much storage is actually in the kitchen. Our landlords (who built the kitchen) did a great job of using every square inch for functional purposes!
• Having a couple of the big appliances (the dishwasher and microwave) tucked behind cabinet doors helps streamline some of the spaces in the kitchen.
• As weird as it is, I love having the bathroom right off the kitchen. More about that below – but it is convenient for a young family!

Shared common area into the kitchen zone:

Our common area (which includes our living room area, dining area, and the entry to our home) merges into our kitchen via a peninsula bar with bar stools. The end of the peninsula is also where the walk-through traffic flow moves to get to our bathroom/utility room.

The bar currently has four bar stools, and it has a handy, large cupboard underneath the bar where we store our kombucha bottles and a few appliances (specifically our large electric skillet, our toaster, and our popcorn popper).

Up above the bar are two suspended, open shelves, which increase the storage area of the kitchen nicely. The top shelf I use to store some less-frequently-used glassware (serving bowls and pie dishes), along with plants. The middle shelf holds our rather expansive tea collection (we are tea-lovers!), along with a box of easy-to-grab card games. There are also a dozen hooks hanging from the bottom of the shelf, which we use to store our mugs and tea pot.

Passage through the kitchen to the bathroom:

One wall of our small, organized kitchen is actually along the traffic flow to the bathroom, and that wall also contains the door to the bathroom. I’ve heard it isn’t ideal to have a bathroom off the kitchen, and I can certainly understand that for germ/cleanliness reasons. But I actually love having the bathroom/utility room off the kitchen! As a mom of young kids, the two spaces I spend the most time in the house are the kitchen and the utility/bathroom. Cooking, making snacks, changing over laundry, supervising showers, wiping bums, overseeing hand washing… It is very convenient to have all of these things happen in about a seven-step area!

The passage-wall has a slight bump out. I found a cube shelf on facebook marketplace that fits the dimensions of the bump out perfectly. We converted that space to our homeschool material storage + home command station. We also have space for recycling, some pantry storage, and (of course) more plants up on top of the shelf. The storage shelf adds a bit more visual busy-ness to the small kitchen than our previous use of that space, but it is a much more functional use of those square feet.

The Fridge + Oven Wall of our small, organized kitchen:

The back wall of our kitchen functions as the main storage and appliance location. In the two black cupboards, we have our small dishwasher, a baking shelf, our microwave, the canned-goods shelf, and extra storage on the top shelf for bulk buys or less-frequently-used items, like glass storage jars.

Above the fridge I keep a lot of my dried goods, including pasta, rice, oatmeal, breakfast cereal, dried beans, and dried fruit. And we have a magnetic knife rack on the fridge, so this is where our kitchen knives live.

Our spices, which feel a bit cluttered to me since they’re on another open shelf, live above the stove top and oven. I also store my nuts and seeds in jars on these shelves, along with my regularly used dutch oven and less-regularly-used yogurt maker. I’ve tried to organize our kitchen visually by using similar-sized containers in groups as much as I can (such as the various jars out in the open).

Under the oven I have some cake pans and muffin tins. And on the counter next to the oven we keep our blender and our huge kombucha-making vat!

Sink + Window Wall of our small, organized kitchen:

We don’t have any upper cabinet or shelf storage on our window wall, but we do have hooks to hang our pots, pan, and some larger utensils. To the left of the sink, I usually have something drying. Although we use our dishwasher pretty much every day, I like to have a spot to air-dry certain items, such as our large electric skillet.

Under the counter top along this wall, we have a deep corner cupboard which I use for additional dried goods. I keep overflow of nuts and seeds, pasta, flour, etc in bins back in the depths of this cupboard. It isn’t the most convenient to pull stuff out, but since I don’t usually need to access it frequently, I can live with that. And it does help our kitchen stay relatively visually organized by having bins that can tuck away!

Also in this corner cabinet, I have a file holder from Kmart which I use to store large lids, cookie sheets, and cutting boards vertically. I also have some bins for my hand mixer and for blender accessories.

In the space under the sink, we store spare tea towels, dish clothes, dishwashing machine powder, dish soap, a roll of paper towels, and zip bags.

In the last cupboard along this wall, I keep my casserole dishes, loaf pans, our slow cooker (when it is not in use), mixing bowls, our salad spinner, and a steamer basket.

Under the bar top:

We have four drawers on the kitchen side under the bar. Yes, I am rather particular about this space of the kitchen being organized! The top drawer holds our cutlery and serving utensils, can opener, veggie peeler, and pizza cutter. The larger appliances (whisk, ladel, etc) hang on the hooks next to the pots because otherwise not everything will fit!

The second drawer down has our drinking jars, plates, and bowls. I like to keep these items accessible to the kids so they can help with setting the table or unloading the dishwasher.

The third drawer is our snack drawer, chocolate drawer, and Yeti mug storage spot. I also keep my protein powder here. And we have some overflow kids bowls that don’t fit in the drawer above this one.

And the bottom drawer is our organized kitchen food-storage container drawer. Jar lids, various plastic storage containers, and randomly, our lemon juicer all live down here. I try to keep this drawer super toddler friendly so my little ones can happily unload or reorganize this without there being any threats of things breaking. I don’t typically let my toddlers have free-run of the kitchen. But I like to have one place that is a “yes” place for them so I can divert them to the “yes” drawer if things like the knobs on the oven start to look too appealing!

Open Shelves are NOT my Natural Leaning for Storage:

A quick note about the shelving and how I’ve organized our kitchen. To be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of open shelves. I like to have visually clean spaces, and shelves tend to feel “busy” to me. (If you want to go down a very interesting rabbit trail and learn some handy organizing tips along the way, check out the Clutterbug YouTube channel. I’m pretty sure I’m a cricket, but I can operate as a ladybug if needed!)

However, as you can see, shelves are a big feature of our kitchen (and our home in general). And they do really help us keep the kitchen organized. So I tried to find ways to “clean up” the shelves in the common space and kitchen as much as I can. This is a work in progress, since our cube shelf is still relatively new. It usually takes me a little while living with something to tweak it until I’m satisfied. But in general, these are the four things I’ve been doing with the open shelves in our home to keep the visual clutter toned down.

Four Tips to Reduce “Busy” Visual Clutter on Open Shelves:

1. Try to embrace a neutral color palette.

Neutral colors feel easier on my eyes to me. This helps the stuff stored on the shelves kind of fade into the background. For example, I only store white or clear glassware up on the tops shelf above the bar. Since the shelves are white, and the ceiling is white, it helps NOT draw my eyes up to them unnecessarily. The bottom shelf above the bar has five matching (neutral) storage boxes to store the more brightly colored tea boxes and games in them. The cube shelf is a little “wild” for me as far as colors go. (I’d prefer white or black or wood tones for the shelves.) But it was a good price and it fit the dimensions I needed really well, so I decided I could live with it. We’ll see if I end up repainting it or something!

2. When I have a busy storage space, I try to have a reoccurring material to bring visual unity.

For example, on the cube shelf, I’ve tried to incorporate bamboo storage items on several shelves to help create a unifying theme. I also have used plants to be a reoccurring item on the shelf. (More about what is in those bamboo storage items below!)

3. I try to leave “breathing space” in areas that have a lot of activity.

One way I’ve done this is I’ve tried to leave space around my plants. The plants themselves also serve to break up the collections of storage stuff. And I tried to keep really busy shelves separated from each other. I opted to plan a less busy shelf between or under full shelves to balance out the busy-ness as well.

4. If all else fails, I use storage containers to visually hide lots of little things.

I decided to purchase a bunch of bamboo drawers and a bamboo magazine box to store all the really little things (tape, rubber bands, paper clips, etc). The bamboo magazine box (turned with the open side toward the wall) gives me a place to put mail that needs to be dealt with without having it sit on the counter in the open. Mara and Jem both have magazine boxes to keep their work-in-progress art papers as well, so we don’t have a lot of papers fanning all over the shelves. I also turn them with the open side to the wall to keep the visual chaos down!

Your Turn: Do You Have Any Experience With A Small, Organized Kitchen?

What space-saving hacks have you found to be beneficial? What do you prioritize in a kitchen? How do you feel about open shelves? Let me know in the comments below – I’d love to learn from your wisdom!