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Empty it onto a towel before you buy anything, because the cabinet under the kitchen sink is the one place where what you find changes the plan. Mine held eleven cleaning products, four of which did the same job, a bucket I had not used in a year, and a slow drip I had not noticed because a bag of sponges was sitting under it absorbing the evidence.
This cabinet is difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with your habits. A drain pipe runs down the middle of it, a garbage disposal takes up a corner, the floor is not level with the rest of the cabinet run, and the whole space is damp more often than any other storage in the house. Standard organizing advice does not fit around a P trap.
Check for water first
Before anything goes back in, run your hand along the pipe joints and the underside of the sink basin, then look at the cabinet floor in decent light. Dark staining, a soft spot in the particleboard, or a white crust on a fitting all mean water has been there. A slow drip under a sink can go on for a year before it announces itself, and by then the cabinet base is spongy.
Mine had a loose slip nut on the trap, which was a quarter turn by hand to fix. If yours is anything more than that, it is worth handling before you spend an afternoon organizing a cabinet you may need to empty again next month.
Line the bottom with something you can pull out
I use a cheap plastic boot tray, the kind meant for wet shoes by a door. It has a raised lip, it catches a small leak before it reaches the wood, and I can slide the whole thing out to check underneath in about three seconds. Adhesive shelf liner does the opposite: it hides moisture and it peels up filthy when you eventually remove it.
Measure the cabinet floor before you buy a tray, and measure the opening too. Cabinet doors have a frame that makes the opening narrower than the space behind it, which is how people end up with a tray that does not go through the door.
Take a hard look at the products
Most under sink cabinets are full because of duplication rather than volume. Line everything up on the floor and group by what it actually cleans, not by brand or by room. I ended up with three glass cleaners, two of which were nearly full and neither of which I liked.
- Keep one product per job. One all purpose spray, one bathroom cleaner, one glass cleaner, one dish soap, one degreaser if you cook the way I do.
- Combine partial bottles of the identical product, and only the identical product. Do not mix anything else, ever, and particularly never anything containing bleach with anything containing ammonia or acid.
- Put anything you did not choose to keep into a bag for proper disposal rather than pouring it down the drain you are standing in front of.
What surprised me was how much of the cabinet was not cleaning supplies at all. Light bulbs, a spare shower curtain, batteries, a roll of shelf paper. None of that belongs in a damp cabinet, and moving it out freed more room than any organizer would have.
Work around the pipe, not against it
The pipe splits the cabinet into a left zone and a right zone, and the useful move is to accept that instead of trying to span across it. I treat them as two separate small cabinets with different jobs.
On one side, a caddy with a handle holding the sprays I carry around the house. Lifting one handle and walking away with everything I need is the difference between wiping down the bathroom and thinking about wiping down the bathroom. On the other side, the things that stay in the kitchen: dish soap refill, dishwasher tablets, scrub brush, extra sponges in a small sealed box so they stay clean.
A caddy is not about tidiness. It is about whether the cleaning happens at all when you are standing in the wrong room.
Vertical space is the space you are wasting
Under sink cabinets are usually much taller than the bottles in them, so half the volume sits empty above the products. There are two straightforward ways to use it. A small two tier shelf that straddles or sits beside the pipe doubles what one footprint holds. Or a tension rod mounted across the cabinet, a few inches below the sink basin, to hang spray bottles by their trigger heads.
The tension rod is the better trick of the two. Spray bottles hanging by their necks take up no floor at all, and you can see every label at once. I fit five on a rod that cost less than a sandwich, and it freed the entire left side of the tray.
The trash bag roll and the door
The inside of the cabinet door is real storage that most people leave blank. A wire rack or a couple of adhesive hooks will hold rubber gloves, a dish cloth to dry, or the roll of trash bags. I keep the current roll of bags standing in the corner of the tray and hang the gloves on the door, because gloves shoved into a corner never dry and eventually smell.
What I keep out of this cabinet entirely
Paper goods, because damp paper towels are useless. Anything that rusts, which includes the good scissors I once left down there. And if there are small children or pets in the house, the cleaning products themselves should move up to a high cabinet, with the under sink space going to sponges, bags, and other harmless bulk instead. A childproof latch is a reasonable second choice, but height is more reliable than a latch a determined toddler will figure out.
How long it holds
Mine has stayed workable for about eight months now, which is far longer than any previous attempt. The two things holding it together are the tray, which makes checking for water effortless, and the one product per job rule, which stops the slow refilling that got me here originally.
Every few months I pull the tray, wipe it, run my hand over the pipe joints, and slide it back. Three minutes. That is the maintenance, and it is short enough that I actually do it rather than promising myself I will get to it.
