I almost forgot to post our next Spring Cleaning Challenge! I knew you'd be super upset and disappointed about not having to clean anything this week. I can't let you down. So here is your next challenge...
Clean out the INSIDE of your cabinets!
And while you have everything OUT of your cabinets...organize them!!!
I did this in my kitchen over the weekend. I must warn you...it's no small undertaking. I didn't take a before picture, however I took a midway pic:
Let me tell you, it's hard to stay motivated and feel like you are making progress when your kitchen looks like that!
I have been wanting to reorganize my cabinets for awhile now. And I'm glad I did it finally! I tried to think about the set up of my kitchen and the traffic patterns of both myself and my family. We have a weird L-shaped nook where my sink is on one side, a lazy Susan in the middle, and the fridge on the other side. And to make matters worse, the snacks were housed in the cabinets above the sink and the cups and plates were housed in the cabinets above the lazy Susan. Talk about a traffic jam! So I started devising a plan to lesson the congestion in that area.
Enter: Pinterest.
Need I say more?
I sort of LOVE that site. If you aren't familiar with Pinterest, you should totally become addicted to it check it out! To officially check out all the pins, you need to be invited. So...if you'd like to be invited, let me know and I'll send you an invite! Anyhoo...Pinterest is FULL of great ideas for everything. I have a board on the site with organizational ideas. So that is what spurred this whole thing on honestly. I was checking out something I had pinned. (I remember now...I was only planning to clean and organize my fridge and went to Pinterest to look at an idea I had pinned.) That led me to a blog where the blogger posted about how to make your kitchen look organized. One of the suggestions was to take a couple of your cabinets doors off the cabinets and use those cabinets to store your everyday dishes...plates, cups, etc. Of course, this really only works well if your dishes are all one color (which mine are...whew!) I knew hubby would never agree to removing cabinets doors, so I had to improvise. I had two cabinet doors that have glass in them (actually it's plexi-glass, but that doesn't sound nearly as lovely, does it?) and decided to move my dishes there. And so far it's working well and does look better than displaying a hodge-podge of cookbooks, wine bottles, and a rolling pin!
So that is where it all started.
Enough of my story...back to the task! Empty out a cabinet at a time so you don't have a kitchen implosion (like I did). Wash down each cabinet shelf with soapy water and allow it to dry. While it's drying, check out the contents from the cabinet. Are there things you don't use regularly use or eat? Do you have too many (for me this was Cool Whip bowls...they are great for leftovers...however not if everyone thinks they are filled with Cool Whip!) so they went bye-bye. So did the gazillion twisty-ties in the silverwear drawer. Keep a box and a trash can nearby while you work so you can easily get rid of things you want to donate or throw away.
I was into this task bigtime! I even went so far as to label all of my seasoning with my label-maker! I tried to take a picture of it, but my camera batteries are dead. (Picture coming soon!)
In the midst of my organiational tornado, my hubby caught the bug too! He was going on and on about how we don't have enough storage and how I should store more of our extra food in the pantry (namely a small closet that is under our steps and currently houses 2 shelves to house our overflow food.)
So he went to the closet.
And opened the door.
And looked inside.
And he realized why I couldn't store any extra food in there, because the closet was packed. With bags, and coolers, and who know what else.
Luckily God made men with the abillity to want to solve women's problems...or any problem really. So he proceeded to remove everything from the closet in order to build a couple more shelves for me! And, again, I would totally take a pic if I had batteries for my camera!
So the picture above is both of our messes combined. But our huge mess ended with huge progress. And as Martha would say, that's a Good Thing!
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