confessions of a clutterer: kitchen day one

Today is day two of my get out house de-cluttered project.  I've decided to start with the kitchen for a couple of reasons:

1. It's where I spend most of my time cleaning.  Every surface in the kitchen is covered.  We have the kitchen table, an island, a butcher block, shelves & my desk.  There's always stuff on them.  I'll clean them off and the 2 days later they're covered again.  I don't know how it happens.
2. It's the biggest project in the house.  Part of me worries that this will overwhelm me and I'll give up, but I feel like I'm determined in a whole new way and I'll finish what I started.
3. I could break it up into smaller sections so it wouldn't be so overwhelming - I hope.
4. The kitchen is the center of the house.  Everything happens in the kitchen and if we could get that under control everything would flow better.
5. Once I finish the kitchen I'll be able to do anything!!

I tackled the desk first.  It's been a mess pretty much since we moved it from my 'office' (which is now Olivia's room) to the kitchen.  Here's my before:

I did a really bad job of capturing the awfulness of this area!  It doesn't look that bad in this picture (but it does look pretty messy).  I have a cart next to the desk which I got to organize my paper and junk since the desk only has that one drawer.  The cart is full of everything that I didn't want on the table.  Also, underneath the desk is a shelf of sorts that you can kind of see at the bottom of the picture.  There's no reason to that madness.

Here's what it looks like now:

Soooooo much better!

I cleared everything off, either threw it away or filed it away.  I have two file boxes.  One for my Girl Scout troop stuff and one for my personal stuff.  In the cart I have paper, photo paper, envelopes, pens, pencils, markers & notebooks.

I love repurposing my stuff.  I use the tea tins for rubber bands and erasers (I use a lot of pencils).  The Glee card game was a gift from a friend, but no one could pay it with me because either they hadn't watched the first season or they just weren't Gleeks like me.  So I took the cards out and I'm using the tin for my furoshikis (Japanese fabric used for wrapping presents or food containers to take to a party, etc.).  And even though the Eclipse gum container is plastic and kind of plain, the top sticker has Edward, Bella & Jacob on it so I had to find something to do with it.  It carries my thumbtacks.  :)

Awhile ago Ray and I saw these sugar skull tequila bottles at Costco except they were MUCH bigger and kind of pricey for tequila I never tasted.  We were at BevMo looking for something and found two of them in small baby versions.  Score!  Ray went to another BevMo and found the third one so we have a complete set!  I also have my yummy smelling Orange Clove candle that was a gift from one of my GS Moms last year.  It takes me forever to burn them.  I'm pretty stingy with my candles.  I don't know why!

That's what I got done on day one.  Stay tuned for day two....cabinets!!