Learn the best way to organize your silverware drawer no matter how big or small your kitchen is with this failproof method.
Time for a quick lesson in organizing basics! I’m all about quick wins that pack a big punch, and in today’s Quick Win Friday tutorial, I want to teach you the basic method for organizing your silverware drawer in your kitchen. Kitchen drawers come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, depths, and materials, so as you follow through this process, try not to get hung up on the exact drawer or products I show in the photos. Just use them as a visual guide, but make alterations based on what your own kitchen is working with. So head to your current utensil drawer, pour yourself a glass of something yummy, and let’s do this quick project together. Ready? Let’s Go!
Empty it. Every divider, tray, drawer liner, sticker; literally everything other than the drawer needs to come out. As you’re pulling things out, if you come across something that doesn’t belong, go ahead and rehome it now. Don’t wait til later, don’t push it to the corner of your counter, just put it away before moving onto step two. Once your drawer is empty, wipe it out with a damp paper towel. Also wipe out or hand wash any utensil trays you kept inside.
Cutlery Tray Desk Drawer Organizer Silverware Holder Kitchen Knives Tray Drawer Organizer
This is something a lot of people skip, but it’s such a necessary step. Instead of just slapping a divided utensil tray into the drawer and letting it slide around all willy nilly, you should position and
It in place. This keeps your drawer tidy and stops you from stuffing random things inside the gaps. Some utensil trays come with little rubber feet that are supposed to keep it from sliding, but they always still find a way to wiggle around.
I suggest buying some museum gel, either in sticky dot form or in a freeform tub, and actually securing every drawer tray into place. This gel is kind of like the stuff your elementary school teacher used to hang posters on the cinder block walls of your old classrooms with, but a little more hip to the times. It’s a sticky but repositionable clear gel, holds strong, but peels off easily for rearranging. These are the go-to ones I use for every drawer in my house.
Drawer Store Bamboo Cutlery, Utensil & Gadget Organiser (j170)
The first part of refilling the drawer is adding your everyday utensils. This is the daily flatware set you use for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The ones you spread peanut butter with and sneak ice cream spoonfuls straight from the carton when no one is around. Not your entertaining utensils, serving pieces, steak knives, or extra sets in other colors or patterns.
Most utensil trays you buy from the store have five main slots, which are for dinner forks, salad forks, soup spoons, dessert spoons, and butter knives. A lot of them have an extra slot at the top that’s shorter and oddly shaped. However, just because that’s how the tray was made doesn’t mean you have to use it that way. If you don’t have two sets of spoons and forks, you can use those extra slots for other things like steak knives, serving utensils, chopsticks, or straws. If you need a new one, this is my favorite and the one I use in most of my client’s houses, too.
Here’s where the organization tricks come into play. You can buy individual drawer trays and compartments in kits or individually that use up every inch of your drawer. Sure, your utensil tray may take up most of the drawer, but there’s likely space in the back or on the side that is wide open.
Kitchen Drawer Organizer 13 Inch Silverware Utensil Tray Holder Extra Deep With
I love this set because it comes with a big variety of sizes and shapes, but you can skip buying extra trays and fill in gaps with stacked paper napkins, small Tupperware containers, and even Ziplock bags filled with small kitchen items like corn cob holders. Think of it as a fun game of Tetris where you are trying to make tiny little apartments to fill a building without wasting any space.
You’ve already given your go-to everyday utensils a permanent tidy home inside your drawer, so whatever else that didn’t fit obviously doesn’t need to have priority access, right? So don’t worry if you couldn’t fit your dinner party salad serving forks and your holiday printed cheese knives alongside them. Some great ways to store extra lesser-used utensils are inside stackable lidded pasta containers in your pantry, in bamboo utensil trays that can be stacked and slid into your dining room sideboard, or packed in airtight sealed containers in your garage.
If you have a few different sets of utensils and you love them all, you can rotate through the sets every few months. So the gold set can stay out during the winter holidays while the matte black and silver sets are packed up temporarily, and you can swap them out as seasons change. It will feel like you’re getting a whole new set every season while helping the sets prolong their lifespan.
Kitchen Utensil Drawer Organizing
Every Friday I share a quick and easy organizing win you can knock out in thirty minutes or less, so if you aren’t already subscribed to my Saturday email, you can do that by dropping your address below. You’ll get a recap of all the posts I shared on the blog for the week, including Quick Win Friday, so you never have to worry about missing anything. You can also follow me on Instagram for short video tutorials to get your home and life Organized-ish. Find me @.This week, I decided to focus on two organization projects that I’ve wanted to do for quite some time — getting my two messiest kitchen drawers under control with a bit of purging followed with some DIY utensil drawer dividers.
I wish I had taken a picture of my silverware drawer before I emptied it out, but just imagine all of your silverware dumped into a drawer with no organization and no dividers. That was my drawer.
I used to have one of those plastic silverware dividers that you get at basically any store that sells housewares. But what I don’t like about those is that they never fill up the entire drawer. So over time, I start filling in the open areas around that plastic divider tray with random junk.
Kitchen Drawer Organizers & Cutlery Trays
So instead of just buying a new plastic silverware divider tray for my drawer, I decided to divide the drawer up myself using the small 1/4-inch-thick project boards that you can find at home improvement stores, Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, etc. The ones I purchased were 1/4-inch by 3 inches by 4 feet.
Before I made any dividers, I placed my silverware and steak knives separated in the drawer to get an idea of where I’d like the dividers.
Once I had a plan, I started making the drawer divider/organizer. Before I could start adding the dividers, I needed to do something with the bottom of the drawer first.
Kitchen Drawer Deep Dive
My cabinets are the stock unfinished oak cabinets from Home Depot, and one thing about these unfinished stock cabinets is that they have some cheap materials. The drawer fronts and doors are oak, but the bottoms of the drawers are super thin hardboard (which I think is like a thin material along the lines of particle board or MDF) with that plastic-lined veneer on top. So over time, the thin drawer bottoms have bowed down a bit in the middle of the drawers.
So before I added my dividers, I cut a piece of 1/4-inch plywood to fit the bottom of the drawer. I didn’t take a picture of this bottom piece on the silverware drawer, but you can see the piece I added on the bottom of the cooking utensil drawer here…
I didn’t glue that piece down or anything. I just placed it in the bottom, and that’s it. This gave me a new flat drawer bottom to work with, but it also gave me something to glue my dividers to. I didn’t necessarily want these dividers to be permanent. I didn’t want to glue anything directly to the drawers so that these are easily removable if I ever decide to change the configuration in the future.
Drawer Storage & Accessories
I glued those four perimeter pieces to each other and to the bottom piece of plywood, but again, I didn’t glue anything to the actual drawer.
Then I began to add the separator pieces only using wood glue. Of course, the order in which you add these will completely depend upon how you want the drawer arranged. But here’s how I added mine.
And as I measured for each divider piece, I added just a smidge (maybe 1/32-inch) to each measurement because I wanted the pieces to fit in the drawer very snug so that the tension would hold the pieces in place until the glue dried. I just used regular wood glue to glue the divider pieces to the perimeter pieces and to the bottom plywood piece.
Cuisio Cutlery Trays
Next I added the large side section. Again,
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