The Best Free Apps for Organizing Your Kitchen — From The Ground Up

“Happiness is a small house with a big kitchen” — Alfred Hitchcock

Even though we don’t have flying cars that fold into briefcases, our houses have certainly lived up to the predictions of science fiction. The smart home of today has programmable windows, tiny autonomous robot vacuum cleaners, and a voice-activated artificial intelligence (AI) device that can understand everything from “call mom” to “define poststructuralism in literature.” That AI device might be the brains of the house, but the kitchen is where you’ll find the hearth and heart of a home.

That’s not to say that technology doesn’t help there as well. Thanks to innovations by leading app development companies, apps turn our phones into digital Swiss Army knives, allowing us to keep track of items, reduce waste and save money. Here are some of the best free apps for keeping your kitchen organized — all are available on Android and iOS and some may have optional paid upgrades.

Home Design 3D

The first and most important step in having a well-organized kitchen is knowing how everything will be laid out. Sketches and floorplans are all well and good, but it can be hard to get a sense for how the room will feel once it’s finished and furnished. You’d need to be sitting in it.

Well, you can! Construction and remodeling apps take advantage of the true processing power of our smartphones and can give us a much better image of how our future homes will look and feel. Home Design 3D strikes an excellent balance between ease of use and looks — it’s very intuitive and the 3D views do a good job of conveying what a room will look like. You should by no means expect high-end graphics, but it’s enough to serve the purpose.

You can add and manipulate objects, walls, doors and windows from a 2D perspective. Switching to 3D still allows you to manipulate objects but gives you a better idea of how they interact. The Visit function locks the camera at eye level allowing you to walk through the rooms and get an even better sense of the space.

If you’re planning a kitchen or house remodel with Home Design 3D, you might find that not all of your old furnishings fit the new style or layout. Using the app, you can create a room where you place all the pieces of furniture that are to be cleared. Take note of how big the room needs to be, and then use a storage unit size guide to find the perfect unit for your needs, which is usually something around the size of a 10’x10’ for most purposes. Problem solved!

Sortly

Murphy’s law says, “You will always find something in the last place you look.” Nowhere does it say that the last place can’t be the first. Sortly feels like the kind of app that took that to heart.

Sortly is dedicated to helping you organize inventory. This app doesn’t have one major function or gimmick that makes it stand out. What it does have is just about any option you could imagine or need to keep tabs on your supplies. This is partly due to the fact that the app is also designed for small businesses, with advanced stockkeeping and inventorying options.

This doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of these advanced features in your kitchen. On the contrary — you can define and set low-stock alerts so you can plan grocery trips ahead of time without having to check your kitchen storage areas. You can organize your items into folders according to location within the kitchen or house. You can assign each item a photo to make it easier to search for it in the app.

You can also update your inventory quickly after bringing in the groceries, using Quick Actions to scan each newly bought product. It will automatically be added to your current stock for that item.

But by far one of the most useful things the app does is generate QR code labels. You can, for example, put all your cleaning products in boxes according to surface type — wood cleaning products, anti-limescale products, window-cleaning products, etc. — and then create a label for each box. Next time you’re looking for a certain product, all you have to do is scan the boxes and see what’s inside.

No time wasted taking boxes off shelves, opening them and then putting them back when you don’t find what you were looking for. This is especially useful for users of storage units, where shelves quickly fill up with nondescript cardboard boxes.

Centriq

Do you have a drawer full of manuals for appliances? Do you really need it, though? Manuals are widely available online nowadays, but they, too, need a virtual drawer to be kept in. Enter Centriq.

This app focuses on helping you with the technical maintenance of your home and appliances. It can scan the product labels of said appliances and automatically obtain the user manuals for them. Not only that, but it can also find spare parts, consumables and instructional materials like how-to videos.

Appliances have to go through maintenance every now and then, and Centriq helps with this as well. You can set custom maintenance periods with reminders, so that you never again forget to replace the filters on your dryer, vacuum or coffee machine.

You can save the receipts for your appliances in the app, making it easier to find them if you need to make a warranty claim. The app also warns you if any of the products you own have been recalled, an often overlooked but important convenience.

Moving into a new home can be very stressful. There are many peculiarities and construction quirks particular to each home, and not knowing them can lead to things like drilling into an electrical line and shorting your entire house’s lighting. Centriq helps with this as well, because you can record videos showing relevant piping, wiring or general information before handing the property over to the new owner or renter.

Tody

Until our robot friends make chores obsolete, we still have to do much of the work of cleaning and tidying up in the house. Sometimes it feels like keeping track is more tedious than the work itself.

Tody is an app that will take this task off your hands. First you specify how many rooms you have and what types. Then you specify what tasks need to be done in each, like mopping the floor, dusting or decluttering. Each task can be assigned an effort level and a recurring day.

These last two parameters are what makes the app so useful, because it can sort tasks using these variables. Feeling energetic today? Check out the tasks that are nearing their deadline and get rid of all that red in the list. Tired after work but still need to do some housekeeping? Choose from some of the low-effort tasks that can be done quickly. You can even assign seasonal tasks, like packing up holiday decorations or mowing the lawn.

Time to talk about Dusty. Dusty is an animated ball of dust and lint with a big grumpy face. He lives in the app and is your sworn enemy in the race to keep your home clean. The more tasks you complete, the further ahead of him you are. If you miss any deadlines or keep putting off tasks, ol’ Dusty will start catching up to you and will eventually overtake you.

The absolute worst part is seeing the joy on his face once he’s ahead. It instantly makes you want to pick up a feather duster. As a motivational tool, Dusty is brilliant!

KitchenPal

KitchenPal is a pantry management system and recipe app all in one. You can scan items to build and update your inventory, but you can also set expiration dates and low-stock alerts for food items. These low-stock items can then be added to your shopping list automatically.

However, expiration notifications are just the first step. KitchenPal goes one step further, showing you recipes for your ingredients. Are your chicken breast and lettuce about to expire? Here’s a wonderful recipe for a salad to take care of the problem.

You can, of course, save preferences like vegan, lactose-free or gluten-free diets, which will then apply to products and recipes displayed in the app. The digital kitchen and grocery lists you create can be shared with other members of the family so that everyone can help with shopping and restocking.

EveryDollar

All this talk about keeping the pantry full and the appliances running cannot fail to address the issue of budgeting. Budgeting apps can act like a force multiplier. Once you understand your spending habits, it’s much easier to make financial decisions that will bring you bigger benefits in the future.

EveryDollar is a budgeting app that helps you manage your finances, save money and even work on that pesky debt. It doesn’t focus on automation as much as other similar apps. This can be helpful especially if you’re just starting out, as you’ll learn faster by being more hands-on with the budgeting process.

The app uses a principle called zero-based budgeting. This means that every dollar you earn is assigned to a specific category of expenses. Zero-based budgeting is great if you want to avoid overspending, and it helps you to get a better feel for what a balanced budget looks like. There is even the option of creating long-term savings goals if you’re planning on making a big purchase in the future.

Self storage can help greatly when organizing your kitchen

If you’re planning a kitchen remodel, whether it’s partial or in full, it’s  great to have a space where to keep furniture and appliances while the work is being done. Storage lockers can keep things like your tableware or cleaning products, while larger storage units can hold appliances and furniture. No need to rush the remodel or move furniture to other areas of the house where it will get in the way. Storage units are affordable and widely available in a variety of sizes and amenities. Here are the self storage facilities you can find in some of the most popular cities in the U.S.

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The kitchen is where a lot of things have to go right at the same time. While this may sound daunting, experience and a few digital aids can make it much easier, helping you reduce food waste and expenses, save money toward the future and live a healthier life!