confessions of a clutterer: kitchen days 3-7

The kitchen certainly took much longer than I expected.  I did take time off here and there for my nephew's birthday and other fun stuff, but I think I got most of it under control!

I was working on the cabinets....still.  I have cabinets on each side of the microwave that I keep baking stuff and cooking stuff.  Baking soda, spices, brown sugar, garlic powder, vinegar.  You know, that kind of stuff.  They looked pretty bad, but they weren't as awful as I expected.  There were some expired things and a couple of things I have duplicates of, but not as many as there were in the pantry :/

 Baking Stuff

 Cooking Stuff

 Condiments & Junk

My befores are on the left and the afters are on the right.  It doesn't look like I did anything, but I swear I did!  In the baking area I tried to keep the stuff I use more often on the bottom shelf.  With the cooking stuff I did the same thing and though it does look crowded it actually is less so.  I greatly thinned out the oils & vinegars and hot sauces on the lazy susan.  To me, it looks a lot better.

The main thing I did was make a list of everything that I have in there so I can keep track of what we have and what we need.  I find that's my biggest problem.  I can't see stuff because I'm so short so I think we don't have it and then I buy another one.  No more, my friends!

And I got these done:

Before

After

Before

After

I still have to work on the cookbooks and food magazines on the bottom shelf.  We went and bought the overlay that goes down so I can put the books up instead of stacking them.  We also got a hook for the fruit basket and I love it.  It was just hanging from the top shelf and taking up room and now it's off to the side.  I thinned out our reusable bags (again) and put them inside my spam musubi bag.  I put all of our outside toys in the bin.  Bubbles, sand toys, chalk and the such.  Generally, these would stay outside until the got infested with spiders or the chalk melted away in the rain.  Hopefully this will keep our stuff a bit longer.

So the kitchen is almost done!  I still have the desk drawer, the junk drawer, the cookbooks and the cabinet above the pantry.  I think I can knock those out in one day and then get started on the living room.  Since Ray is off this week we're taking the girls to the beach tomorrow with my parents and maybe doing a couple of other fun things, but I think I can squeeze in a couple of hours of cleaning somewhere!

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!

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!!