I organized my kitchen like Netflix’s ‘The Home Edit.’ Here’s what I learned

Netflix’s new show, “Get Organized with The Home Edit,” has legions of obsessed fans – including me. The show has been my guilty pleasure this fall. It follows professional organizers Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin as they organize celebrities’ and “regular people’s” homes to perfection. When my husband and I gut-renovated our kitchen this month, I decided to take my inspiration from the show and go all-in on organization when we restocked the kitchen.

Here are some things I learned:

1. Minimalism is harder in the kitchen. I am a big proponent of minimalism. My closet is pared down to the essentials, I constantly weed through my kids’ toys for what they don’t play with anymore, and I don’t like a lot of knick-knacks. But Marie Kondo-ing is harder in the kitchen than any other room, especially if you have a family of six. I knew that I wanted my countertops to be empty, but I didn’t realize how much stuff you have to have to keep a kitchen functioning as it should. So I had to let go of that love of “emptiness” when it came to the kitchen and focus more on organizing than on paring down.

• It takes a lot of stuff—and money—to be organized. Netflix’s Home Edit calls that stuff “product,” and their show is essentially an advertisement for their home organization line, available at The Container Store (mainly kitchen products). The show is obviously having an effect, because everyone in the store was making a beeline to the kitchen section, like me. But the cost adds up quickly – organizing a kitchen the way they do in the show could easily cost $1000 with those products.

• The refrigerator is its own beast. Instagram is full of uber-organized refrigerators, and I really wanted mine to look like those pretty, colorful photos I kept seeing. But it definitely takes some work to get it there. First, I had to figure out our “mainstay” foods – what we always wanted to have in stock in our fridge. Then, each type of food needed a bin or its own section. Assign yourself extra time after a grocery store trip to take the food out of their boxes, wash the fruit and vegetables, and put them all in their place.

• Check Amazon first. The Container Store was sold out of a lot of products, and when I went to look for them on Amazon, I realized I could get the same bins for less money. I also found great products, like pot lid organizers, that I didn’t see at The Container Store.

• Put everything kids need access to on lower shelves. When we reorganized the kitchen, we completely rethought where everything was stored. In our old kitchen, our dishes and glasses were on the shelves about the counter. In our new kitchen, they are in drawers below the counter so the kids can get them out themselves. All of the kids’ snacks and water bottles are now accessible also, so they don’t have to climb on stools to get them. We saved the higher shelves for things like serving platters, wine glasses, the coffee maker, and extra storage containers.

• Put all appliances away. Yes, it is possible to do this, and it looks so much better. We stored the coffee maker, the toaster, the Instapot, and the French press in the cabinets, and it really isn’t a lot of extra work to take them out and plug them in when we want to use them.

• Organize your junk drawer. This was the last project I did, and it brought me a lot of peace of mind. We found $200 in gift cards hidden in there, some unused Metro cards, and a lot of things we could throw out. The Home Edit’s drawer organization sets were perfect for this task, because they come with different sized boxes that fit inside one another – making it much easier to see what is in your drawer, what you need and what you don’t.

Was it worth it to adhere to the Netflix “Home Edit” approach? Yes. It did require some investment in containers, but I feel like it will ultimately save us money because I won’t be buying excess food that we won’t eat. I can see clearly what is in our refrigerator and what we are out of, which makes shopping easier. This afternoon, when I typically would have ordered a salad, I chose instead to make lunch from what was in the refrigerator, because I realized how much we actually had. It’s also a really nice feeling to open a drawer and see everything in its place.