By Katie Bennett, Contributing Writer

If you’re like me, the kitchen is the central hub of your house. As a stay-at-home, work-at-home, full-time mama of two young kids, I am constantly prepping meals and snacks and endlessly cleaning.

While I am naturally more of a “clutter person,” my husband is an “efficiency, functional, no-clutter person,” and through the course of our marriage, he has taught me the beauty of his ways.

Decluttering the kitchen is helpful for a two reasons:

• It’s MUCH easier to keep clean and neat. When we stripped down to less stuff, the result was less resistance to cleaning up (which I spend so much time doing anyway). This was a huge advantage for me. Getting everything in its place was no longer such an impossible task.
• The kitchen is more functional overall. I have plenty of work space on my counters; I can find things; and I don’t have to fight my drawers when I want to open them or put things away.

While this may sound like a good idea, it may also seem a daunting.

My hope is to make this concept a little more actionable for you today by giving you ideas for how to quickly declutter a few key kitchen problem areas.

Hopefully this will feel doable.

3 Problem Areas to Quickly Declutter in Your Kitchen

1) Your kitchen counters

I recently wrote a post for another site entitled “3 Things I Leave Out on My Kitchen Counter and 3 Things I Don’t.” It was a simple post, but got a quite a response. In fact, I’ve have had several people contact me to let me know how much their homes and lives have been improved and how satisfied they now feel because they cleared off their counters after reading the post.

It was a lot of fun to write something that resonated with people, but it also reinforced my belief that clean kitchen counters fulfill a longing that many of us have for a simpler, easier-to-maintain life. I know they do for me.

What does this look like practically? It may mean putting some things that are currently sitting on your counters away in cabinets or drawers. And that may mean clearing some of your least-used items out of your cabinets to put away in a closet or basement (or even better… donate them!)

So grab a box and get started!

2) Your utensil drawer

This is another topic I’ve written about that also garnered an encouraging response. Those who followed through on the suggestion to declutter their utensil drawer expressed amazement about how little time it took and what a difference it made.

If you’re like me, your utensil drawer doesn’t quite fit all those nifty utensils you’ve accumulated. As a result you’re fighting with the drawer every time you want to open it or put something away.

The solution? Remove the least used items and store them elsewhere! Keep only your daily essentials in this drawer and you’ll have no trouble finding and accessing what you need.

(You can read my full “utensil drawer” post here).

3) Your cups

Is your “cups storage area”  overflowing with mismatched, or more importantly, unused cups? This might be a good spot for you to gain back some precious cabinet space.

I know after five years of marriage and two young kids coming onto the scene, our cup situation had gotten pretty sorry. After many broken glasses, things no longer matched, and as a college student and later a teacher I’d accumulated bulky mugs and water bottles I didn’t love and rarely used.

Not to mention our lives had changed. We needed glasses and cups to accommodate both our growing young children and our increased entertaining/hospitality.

So it made sense for us to send much of our jumbled cup-collection to Goodwill and buy one matching, functional set of cups.

The advantage to purchasing matching cups or glasses, obviously, is they stack together neatly if needed, take up less space, and look nicer. This might be a worthwhile investment in your kitchen decluttering-pursuit. (And, I know some of you just can’t get excited about a task until there’s shopping involved…:)

We bought 2 sets of these Tervis Tumbers. They are nearly unbreakable, lifetime guaranteed, dishwasher safe and still look fairly classy. They are also insulated, which prevents water rings on furniture and allows them to be used for hot or cold drinks. They seemed like the best of all worlds for our situation and, most importantly, allowed us to simplify. I love versatility.

Another thought: if your kids, husband, or you tend to get out a new cup every time each of you want a drink, you may also consider buying or keeping personalized cups. Each person knows his or her cup and uses it all day. I know people who also use Tervis Tumblers this way, since you can get a variety of designs and buy them individually. Christmas gifts perhaps?

Is there one area that you were able to quickly declutter for big results?