Tony Tye, Post-Gazette photos
	BEFORE: In the Benson home in Richland, space planner Lynn Staab, left, photographs a cluttered cabinet.
	Tips for you Involve the family , explaining why it's important to keep things organized. Let them help decide what to pitch and how to organize what's kept. Tackle one drawer, cabinet or closet at a time to avoid getting overwhelmed. Plan each space's function. Follow the S.P.A.C.E. method: Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize. Consider installing bins, shelves or racks to create more storage space and help you find the items you need.
	AFTER: Nice and tidy. Sorting and purging freed up one whole cabinet's worth of space in the Benson kitchen. Kids' cups are now on an easy-to-reach first shelf.
	Drawers re-organized by space planner Lynn Staab. In this drawer, pens, rubber bands and other office supplies now are easy to find.<</b>
	Reorganized kitchen in the Benson family's home.

Like many people, Jeryl Benson's kitchen had become a gathering place -- for clutter. Beneath the calm surfaces of her closed cabinets and scrubbed countertops lay a morass of objects that had migrated into her kitchen during her family's 12 years in their Richland home, and never had left.

Some items, such as her youngest children's sippy cups, needed a "home" in her large kitchen to keep them from scattering throughout her cabinets. Others, such as a box of guest response cards from her wedding -- 18 years ago -- needed to be purged.

Why not start the new year with an organized kitchen? With the help of professional organizer, space planner and interior designer Lynn Staab of Organized Spaces in Brookline, Mrs. Benson learned some simple tricks that tamed her kitchen clutter in six hours flat. And Mrs. Benson soon discovered that she loved the experience of reclaiming her kitchen.

"I was a little reluctant at first, but once you get started, you get on a roll and then you start purging other things," said Mrs. Benson, a Duquesne University professor of occupational therapy with four children, ages 7, 5, 3 and 1. "I was liberated."

For most people, the kitchen is a central command center where, in addition to preparing and eating meals, they drop off and open mail, do homework, pay bills and unload groceries. But without a system in place to manage all that paper and all those supplies -- remember those batteries you bought six months ago and never saw again? -- the items multiply into endless clutter.

"People open up their packages and say, 'Where am I going to put this?' and they shove it in a drawer, they stick it here, they stick it there and the kitchen becomes a catch-all for everything," Ms. Staab said.

The result, she said, is a kitchen where people can't find what they need when they need it -- or forget they ever had it and buy still more of some item, wasting money and space on what will become still more clutter.

To tackle Mrs. Benson's clutter, Ms. Staab followed a method some organizers call S.P.A.C.E.: Sort, purge, assign a home, containerize and equalize. She also purchased about $75 worth of bins and other organizing supplies at a discount store, although she emphasizes that reorganizing a kitchen, or any space, can be done at no cost by following some basic principles.

To avoid becoming overwhelmed, Ms. Staab advises dealing with one cabinet, drawer, shelf, closet or corner at a time. Whoever is leading the reorganization charge should persuade family members to help with the process; that way, she said, they have an interest in keeping things neat, and they know where to find things they need after the reorganization.

First, Ms. Staab says, pull everything out of the space to be organized and sort it into piles, deciding along the way what can be purged by throwing it away, returning it to its owner, donating it or putting it away in another part of the house. Everything has to go into one of those piles; a "miscellaneous" pile is just destined to become more clutter.

If food is expired, throw it away. If spices are more than a year old (when you buy new ones, write the date of purchase on them so you can keep track), throw them away. If something is broken and can't easily be fixed, that should get tossed as well.

Then, decide on the function of the space you have just purged. Is it near lunch supplies such as peanut butter and puddings, making it a good place for plastic bags, wax paper, napkins, lunch boxes and thermoses? Is it a cabinet above the cake pans and cookie sheets, making it a good place for a "baking station" to house flour, sugar, baking soda, chocolate, nuts, yeast and similar ingredients?

Then, Ms. Staab said, assign a home to your piles, placing the most-used items nearest to your immediate reach and the least-used and seasonal items farthest away. Light items such as baskets and cereals can go on fairly high shelves, while heavy items such as stand mixers, bread machines, crock pots and roasting pans should go down below.

If you have children, place items you want them to be able to reach, such as fruit juices, on low shelves and items you want them to ask for, such as candy, on high ones.

Group packaged and canned goods into categories such as staples, baking ingredients, vegetables, fruits, meats, sauces, beverages, snack foods, etc.

Once you've decided where items should go, "containerize" by buying bins, drawer dividers or other containers to keep small items together.

Also, small kitchens can benefit from racks hung on the backs of doors or from ceilings to store spices or hang pots and pans, freeing up cabinet space for bulkier items. Cookbooks can be tucked into shelves built over doorways, next to cabinets or into other unused nooks.

If your cabinets are so deep that items tend to get lost in the back, a step shelf along the back, a lazy Susan or a slide-out drawer unit can bring long-lost treasures to light (and don't be embarrassed to make a list of what's back there if necessary). Slide-out drawer units installed in cabinets also can make cookware and other equipment more accessible if bending and lifting is difficult. For additional storage space in small kitchens, consider buying a baker's rack or cart to hold more supplies.

For Mrs. Benson, the focus of reorganization was a bank of four cabinets and drawers along one side of her kitchen, which she, her husband Troy and their four children had taken to stuffing with whatever item they didn't know what else to do with.

As a result, batteries, a camera, a screwdriver, barrettes, rubber bands, old cell phone chargers, obsolete eyeglasses, sippy cups, lunch boxes, a phone book from 1998, containers without lids and the aforementioned response cards were among the items that had to be tossed or moved to other areas of the house.

By unpacking, sorting, purging and "containerizing," however, the two women freed up an entire cabinet, in addition to creating a home for all the lunch accessories that had been scattered throughout the cabinets. And in the pantry, Ms. Staab consolidated five partially used boxes of confectioner's sugar and four open bags of pretzels and then grouped them with like foods, freeing another shelf.

To help organize the Benson kids' school papers -- which they usually scatter all over the kitchen countertops after school -- Ms. Staab bought a mesh wire desk organizer, with slots for mail and a Manila folder for each child's schoolwork. The organizer will help with the final step, which is to "equalize," or spend a few minutes each day putting things back where they belong and evaluating whether the system needs tweaking.

That desk organizer, some plastic bins and trays, and a talk with her kids hopefully will help keep the kitchen organized, Mrs. Benson said.

"I told them that everything has a place where it belongs and that they would always be able to find it there, but only if they remembered to put it back when they were finished with it," Mrs. Benson said.

And if the reaction of her eldest son, 7-year-old Thadeus -- a perpetual hunter of rubber bands to bundle his baseball cards -- is any indication, there is hope for lasting order. Thadeus was thrilled that all the rubber bands were sitting together in a little plastic bin in a kitchen drawer, Mrs. Benson said.

"When Thadeus came home from school, the first words out of his mouth were, 'Wow, now I can find anything,' " she said.

These tips can help you tame your clutter and reclaim your kitchen, one cabinet at a time.

Involve other members of the household, explaining why it's important to keep things organized and letting them help decide what to get rid of and how to organize what's kept.

Tackle one small piece of clutter at a time -- a drawer, cabinet, closet -- to avoid getting overwhelmed.

Plan the function of each space.

Follow the S.P.A.C.E. method of organizing: Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize.

Look into installing bins, shelves, racks, and other devices to create more storage space and help you find the items you need. )