This is part of Organizing For A Focused Christian Life, a Blog Series.
I’ve lived in a lot of different homes over the years and they all have different layouts, but it seems like wherever I live the living room is right next to the kitchen and they almost morph into one, except for some kind of half wall or bar that separates them, so organizing the kitchen after the living room (or even at the same time) seems to make a lot of sense to me.
Purge: The steps to cleaning any room are basically the same, just with different minor circumstances. To start organizing your kitchen you have to consider what is in it that could be distracting you from your relationship with God? For most people, the obvious answer would be any unhealthy food, but we have liberty in our lives to decide for ourselves what we want to do with our diet. What I suggest is to start with getting rid of any food that has gone bad or any kitchenware that is no longer useful as well as any other mess or junk that have accumulated over time.
Relocate: It really doesn’t take very long for things to pile up in the wrong area. Our kitchen counter takes about half a day to go from spotless to a train wreck. Now is the time that you want to make sure things are in the right room and in the right place so that you can get a fresh start on having an organized kitchen.
Shuffle: Unlike the living room, the kitchen is usually pretty set in stone with the big stuff. The fridge has a place, the dining table has a place and so on with the oven, the dishwasher, sink, etc. So instead you might want to re-consider where the smaller appliances go, from the microwave to the blender, so that the things that you really need are accessible and the things that you never use (like that eight piece dinnerware set that you break out only for Thanksgiving dinner when it is actually held at your home) are put away in the deepest, darkest corner of the cabinets.
Filing: Every room has those little things that stack up faster than anything. In the kitchen it starts with making sure that all of your dishes have been cleaned and washed because they stack up faster than just about anything else in the house. After that, you may have a junk drawer (where you stash random stuff) that you might want to reconsider or a silverware and other utensils that you might want to relocate.
It is hard to imagine that something like a kitchen could be optimized for a focused Christian life, but when you take care of these little things it means fewer things are in the way of spending quality, disciplined time with God.
Have you considered optimizing your kitchen’s organization for an undistracted Christian life?
