Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from our family to yours!

Organize the Kitchen? Why, yes, I think I will...

This will not be very interesting to anyone but me, but I do enjoy a good day of organization.  Any time I find myself feeling annoyed with the amount of space (or lack thereof) in our house, I try to think about how to reuse the space in better ways. If you need some organization inspiration, head over to I Heart Organizing . Check out her project gallery for some ideas...I love that website!

I made a list of all the areas in our house that I wanted to work on over the break and funnily enough, the kitchen did not make that list. However,  somehow I ended up spending a couple of hours cleaning and reorganizing our kitchen yesterday.

I always felt like we did not have enough cabinet space in our kitchen, but after snapping some pictures of the cabinets, it was easy to see that space was not the issue; they were just messy and disorganized.

This is one of the problems in our house, things start out organized but when we are in a hurry, we tend to just throw things wherever and over time, that clutters everything up.

We have a huge cabinet over our kitchen sink that was not being used well.  There was too much stuff in it and some items, like to-go coffee mugs, had to be crammed wherever I could find a space.

Before

Before

After

For this cabinet, I moved less used items to a different cabinet or to the highest shelf. Since we use tupperware everyday for lunches, I moved them from a slide out cabinet (picture below) in our pantry to this easy-access cabinet. Like! Before, our tupperware lids were taking over the world.  Now they are tucked inside a container inside the cabinet and are much more contained.

We have a huge, deep cabinet above our refrigerator.  I hardly ever go in it and it can be hard to access things in the back (I may need to invest in a foldable step stool).  Pretty much the only time I used this cabinet was to get out a vase every now and again. It was a huge waste not to be using this cabinet for storage in a more effective way. 

Before                                         

After

First I cleaned the cabinet out and then moved less used items to it, like baking pans and serving ware. This is a good cabinet for those bulky items that I don't use as often. It's not a very dramatic "after" shot, but it does reflect more thoughtful organizing in terms of what is stored there now!

We also have a large cabinet above the microwave that was in need of attention. Again, I took everything out of the cabinet and gave it a good scrub down.

Before

One of the problems with this cabinet was that I couldn't see everything easily. Because the cabinet is not at eye-level, it was often hard to see all the canned goods. Also, there was a hodgepodge of overflow tupperware in this cabinet and miscellaneous boxes of tea.

After

We have two cabinet shelves from IKEA that were not being used effectively before. Now, I moved them both to the top shelf to help display items that are very high up. Now that I can see everything, I won't be buying repeat items by mistake anymore!

The last cabinet that I reorganized was pretty atrocious.  People usually have a "junk drawer". This was the equivalent to a junk cabinet.   

This cabinet held some meds, lint rollers, some cleaning supplies, lunch boxes, and paper plates. And they were all out of control. This was the cabinet that you would open and hope that nothing fell out onto your head. 

Before

After

I pretty much got a whole empty shelf out of this one! I moved all the cleaning products to our cleaning caddy in the laundry room, so that freed up a lot of space. Garbage bags went under the sink. All plastic  cups, plates, and utensils went up together on the top shelf.  I can breathe again...

Reorganizing the kitchen cabinets was mostly about being more thoughtful about where things were placed. High-use items needed to go to more easily accessed cabinets. Lesser used items got moved to the storage shelves in the basement, a different cabinet, or the Goodwill pile.

Little changes like this make me so much happier to live in our house.  Have a happy Friday!

                                     

A Day to Catch Up...

Nothin' much new here. I'm just finishing up my 8th grad class this week and I'll be happy to be done with it! Only two more classes to go, plus a Capstone project and I'll be officially done with my Masters program.

This week I've been busy working on my final for class and trying to get things done for the holidays. This morning I woke up, showered, and started getting ready for work. Around 6:30, I checked my phone only to find that we have no school because of a power outage. I'm pretty grateful to have an extra day to get things done this week! I have a list of things to knock out before the weekend.

On Sunday, we went to the Lions game and this is a picture I took on my phone as we were walking to Hockeytown. I don't know what the plan is for this building, but only the front of the building is standing...made for a cool picture.

13 Hours Left!!!!

There are only 13 hours left until my Donors Choose project expires...and we don't want that to happen, now do we??

Livin' Loud with a New Listening Center

Check out my project at the above link...and then please donate! Every little bit helps!