confessions of a clutterer: kitchen day two

Even the best laid plans....

I was going to focus on the table and island today, but then I thought maybe I should save that for last.  Let it collect the stuff off of everything else that needs to be sorted and removed or taken to where it belongs.  I thought maybe I should work on the metal shelving we have.  I started that and then I got sidetracked by the cabinets.  Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

So here's where we were in the beginning:

I didn't get too far with the shelving.  With all the snacks we had on this first section I realized we have snacks and food all over the kitchen without too much order to it.  So I started going through all the cabinets.  It was incredibly ridiculous.  I couldn't believe how much expired food we had in our cupboards.  But then there was so much of it.....

The 'bread' cupboard has bread and everything else in it.

The cabinet underneath the bread nook has a ton of canned foods & snacks.

An add on pantry-like cupboard.  Everything from oatmeals, chips, cookies, drinks & snacks were in here.

These are the pull out drawers in the island.  Teas and crystal light packets on the left and pastas and other dried goods, dressings in the right.  What I didn't take picture of are the drawers in between these cabinets.  Full of pastas, lentils, dried soup packets, candy, etc.  Above the cabinets is a junk drawer and my drawer of zip lock bags & parchment paper, wax paper, that kind of stuff.

Now, I didn't get through everything.  The junk drawer is a project in itself.  What I tried to do was go through all the food and get rid of the expired items.  I had stuff that expired in 2009!  One of the problems I found is that our cabinets are deep and we are lazy.  Rarely do I go through what we have already before I go grocery shopping.  So may boxes of Wheat Thins!  One of my hopes is that with all this cleaning I will keep a better working knowledge of what's in my kitchen so I can use it up instead of letting it go to waste.

I ended up with this:

For the first time ever I oiled the butcher block!  It looks so different now!  I thinned out the snacks and got rid of most of the baking stuff.  A lot of things I will never use (I'm not much of a baker so the basics is probably all I need).  What I do use, for not I put them in a cabinet that has other baking stuff in it.  Ray wants to move the bottom shelves up so the Roomba can get under there.  Once that's done I'll figure out how to use that shelf.

This looks so much better!  I put our bags of chips that were in the bread nook on the bottom shelf with some of the snacks that I eat.  Emma's snacks I kept on the metal shelving since that's easier for her to see and get to.  The canned foods and dressings, marinades are on the top shelf, but in a way that I can spin it and see everything clearly.

The bread nook has just bread in it!  Woo hoo!  Well, bread & tortillas.

Here's the right side pull out drawer.  I took my dried goods (oatmeal, red lentils, quinoa, barley, coconut flakes, chia seeds & wild rice) and put them in some of the canning jars I have.

Ahhhhhh pantry.  Did you know that chips only last a couple of months unopened?  I didn't.  Now I do.

My plan of getting areas done in chunks didn't go exactly as planned, but I did go through most of the food cabinets.  I can get behind that.  I've got to figure out what to do about our garbage though.  Monday was garbage day and by Monday evening our freshly emptied garbage can was filled up again.

Little by little we're getting there!