Do your kitchen countertops feel hopelessly cluttered? Do you have to paw through drawers to find the whisk? Do you have to walk to reach the ground nutmeg?

Don’t despair. Your kitchen has more usefulness and practicality in its future. Here are some tips from experts in the field on how to make your kitchen work for you.

Here are some work-saving adaptations:

• Locate an in-home office in the kitchen. He designed one so that the office was convenient to (but concealed from) the cooking space.

• Save your countertops by installing a stove surface next to the range. Granite, slate and some marbles work well and have another advantage: Apply ice to the surface before rolling out dough so it won’t stick.

• A knife-drawer insert keeps your knives sharper, safer and better organized. Access your cutlery more easily with a two-layered cutlery drawer, where the top layer slides back to reveal less commonly used items below.

• Create more work space between appliances and allow for better use of cabinet storage with a corner sink .

• Make your hood more attractive and less noisy. Instead of using standard metal, install a metal liner with a custom outer shell, and mount a remote blower to make it quieter.

Here are some more great ideas to streamline your culinary world:

• Eliminate counter clutter with an innovation from Europe called a backsplash hangrail, a bar system that goes underneath wall cabinets and around your entire kitchen. It is designed to hang specially made shelves and hooks, such as a round utility basket, a hanging knife block, or even a plate holder.

• Stop standing on chairs to reach inaccessible top shelves. Look for a shelf system that’s built into a wall cabinet, whereby high shelves can be pulled out and down to rest on your countertop.

• Another innovation for high shelves is a mini-ladder that you store in the toe kick space (the 4 inches below your cabinet).

•Store root vegetables in sturdy-wire-basket vegetable bins that pull out of your cabinets on roll-out trays.

• Protect your back (and your mixer) from being picked up at an awkward angle and lugged around. A specially designed mixer shelf pops up and provides a makeshift countertop for heavy appliances like mixers.

• Rather than hanging dish towels on the oven handle, put a towel rod around your island. Towels then become easy to grab from any place in the kitchen, saving you steps and time when your hands are dripping or someone spills a glass of wine.

• Install a tilt-down drawer at the sink for scrub brushes, sponges and wipes.

• Mount your garbage can on a roll-out drawer under the sink. Take the swinging door and retro-fit it as a full-height drawer face.

• Replace your regular microwave oven with a microwave convection oven, so you get a double oven in the space of one.

• Eliminate your dish drainer. Load dishes directly into the dishwasher during the day. When you have guests and need to hand-wash, use a collapsible dish drainer that stows away under the sink.

• Save steps by storing spices above your stove, on a spice rack or a lazy susan in a cabinet, or even just on the stove’s back ledge. If you’re using your spices a lot, they won’t be there long enough for the heat to hurt them.

• Keep a rubber mat on the floor in front of the sink to catch drips. It prevents the floor from getting slippery and dirty.

• Store plates and glassware in a cabinet above the dishwasher, not across the room.

Copyright © CTW Features