Flip through any home magazine (including this one), and you’ll find a healthy selection of sleek, spacious and orderly kitchens, their calm beauty practically irresistible. As alluring as these designer kitchens might be, however, remodeling to get one is not as pleasant a prospect. Any remodeling survivor will attest to the enormous mental and physical stress, expense and time investment that accompany a project. And even if you use the greenest materials, there’s still a good amount of environmental fallout associated with a kitchen remodel.

Is it possible to get a bigger kitchen without remodeling? Absolutely. By using the space you have more wisely, you can create the serene and spacious kitchen of your dreams.

Step 1: Remove

If anything stands in the way of a well-functioning kitchen, it’s clutter. Maneuvering around counters and cupboards overrun with outdated rice mixes, half-used bags of pasta, broken blenders and unwieldy stacks of lids is just no fun.

The simple solution. Remove the excess and don’t be bashful about it! As a general rule, recycle anything you haven’t used in the past year. If you have trouble parting with an item, box it and store in the garage for a while to ease the transition. (If you still haven’t used it one year later, recycle or donate it.) Call a professional organizer or a good friend if you need more help letting go of stuff.

Step 2: Rearrange

Once your kitchen is decluttered, take stock of how well the remaining items are arranged. Is the placement of each item logical and does it work with your cooking and serving flow? Three specific strategies accomplish these ends:

Group like with like. It takes 20 to 30 foods and cooking tools to prepare even a simple meal, such as stir-fry with rice or pasta with salad. If those items and ingredients are scattered helter-skelter around the kitchen, cooking won’t feel serene. Rearrange foods and cooking tools into logical groupings, bearing in mind that each cook’s definition of “logical” will vary. Place all your cooking oils and vinegars in one place, dried herbs and spices in another, pastas and grains in another, baking ingredients in another and so on. For additional guidance, check out how foods are grouped in the grocery store and how cooking equipment is arranged in a kitchen store.

Ease your cooking flow. After everything is organized, rearrange the item groupings to match your cooking flow. To understand your flow, “walk” through a typical meal, from chopping and sautéing an onion to browning tofu and assembling a green salad. As you walk through each step, note where you are and whether that location makes sense.

For example, many recipes begin by sautéing an onion. To do so, must you walk to the pantry to find an onion, over to a knife drawer by the sink, over to a built-in cutting board by the stove, over to the compost pail with the onion scraps, and finally back to the cutting board to finish chopping? That’s not “flowing”—that’s zigzagging! Storing the onions close to the sink and installing a chopping station with a second cutting board nearby would make things simpler.