The Smart Hack That Keeps Your Kitchen Cookware Organized & Decluttered

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There's some cookware you should almost always get rid of without question. Is it a pot missing a lid? Gone. Is a warped baking sheet turning out curly cookies? Yep. That should go, too. Duplicate? Yep. But what about the other stuff? When do you know when to get rid of it? Or more importantly, how do you even recognize that you're not using it and that it's just taking up space in the cupboards? If you want to make kitchen clutter a thing of the past, you just may benefit from a very simple organizational hack: washi tape.

In all fairness, some good old-fashioned masking tape would also work for this purpose, (though, admittedly, Emmoolife's Vintage Floral Washi Tape is a lot prettier than masking tape). This home-decluttering trick is simple. You're going to stick a piece of tape on all of your cookware, and then you'll mark the date that you first applied tape to your pots and pans and other bits and pieces. Any time you use anything that's marked with the tape, pull the tape off. At the end of a 3- to 6-month period, take anything off the shelves and out of the pantry that still has tape on it. 

A 6-month period should be enough time for you to use all of these kitchen pieces, including those that you normally pull out only for special occasions. These would be items like the double-boiler you use to make homemade chocolate candy at Christmas and Easter. Your most-oft-used pieces will have the tape removed from them almost immediately. The rest will emerge over time. With this kitchen-organizing trick, it isn't inaccurate to say that you'll be organizing before you actually apply the washi-tape hack. That is to say, you'll first have to go through all of your cookware to mark each piece with the tape in the first place. During that walkthrough, you'll probably already find items that you don't use, though whether or not you should throw them away may be debatable at that juncture.

Here's something to keep in mind as you move through your stuff, too: if you have some old cookware that was given to you by a good friend or your mom for your wedding, or a special occasion, those may be harder to part with. In the latter case, the Marie Kondo method may be more effective. Simply ask yourself, "Does this spark joy? Or am I keeping it out of guilt, duty, or fear of regret?" If the latter, it may be worth responsibly recycling or donating that blender, to give it a new life. This system also has the advantage of not asking you to go through your kitchen clutter all at once, which can be overwhelming. Doing it all at once just feels like too big a task, whereas removing a pan here or a pot there and an old spatula on another day is more manageable. You're not getting rid of everything in your cupboard all at once. You're just tossing out or giving away a single item. That's much easier to deal with mentally and may just help you keep your sanity while you declutter.