Putting my kitchen on a diet

My kitchen bugs me. The cabinets are overstuffed with "stuff" and some of them are so bad that if you open the door too quickly things fall out onto the ceramic tile floor and break. I can't find a lot of items I use or would like to use more often. We have multiples of some items that we simply don't need multiples of. I bought a really neat modular food storage system for putting away and saving leftovers, but I kept the mishmash of plastic food storage oddities I was using before. I have some lovely glass pie pans which bake the very best crusts, but I also still have a half dozen cheapie tin ones cluttering up the shelves that I never use. The top of the refrigerator hadn't been cleaned since who knows when. I think you get the picture.

So last night, I began to slowly pare down and organize my kitchen. It's going to take a while, but I think it'll pay huge dividends in sanity and efficiency once I've finished. The first place I worked on was our cabinet above the trash compactor. It had been set up as more or less a larger version of the ubiquitous kitchen "junk drawer" (and yes, we have one of those, too, which I will get to later...) and was one of the cabinets things have been routinely falling out of. So I completely emptied it out, sorted the mess, threw away a large part of it, and refilled the cabinet with small appliances I like to use on a regular basis, but which were always on top shelves and very difficult for me to reach. One tiny bit of sanity reclaimed.

That made me feel so good that I just started working my way around the room. Next was the top of the refrigerator, and I won't even say how much junk and dust and grime I found there. I'll just leave it to the imagination - but be sure to imagine a lot. However, it's gone now and the only things still up there are three large bags of bulk cold cereal that I will be transferring to large pourable containers tomorrow. The cabinet above the fridge is also now cleared out and is home to a few things I use very seldom, but don't want to have to hike downstairs for when I need them. Things like the family-size Salton Yogurt Maker, and an extra small crockpot.

After that, I began to tackle the pantry wall. I consolidated all the dry goods cannisters and put them up high, and put the stuff that gets used every day in the two middle shelves. We now have a shelf just for items we use for bringing lunches to work and school - no more bleary-eyed digging in multiple cabinets in the morning looking for thermos jars and lunch kits and lids for the mess. I then pulled out the mish-mash of plastic containers and lids made obsolete by the new modular stuff and set them aside for the garage sale we'll be having in a couple of weeks. I also pulled out baking multiples like the tin pie pans and set many of them aside for resale. I took a good look at where and how things were being stored, and moved them around to where large items like oil containers no longer have to lay on their sides and leak because they are not able to stand upright on the shelves. That one change alone probably gained me back a handful of sorely needed sanity points.

I'm not finished by a long shot - but I have made significant improvements in just an evening's work. I am planning to work on it more this afternoon and evening, and after class tomorrow I will take a trip to the Don Aslett cleaning store here in town to pick up some specialty cleaning items like a cobwebber and a ceiling fan brush. I don't know what happened to the ones I had in Texas, but apparently they didn't make the move with me, and I'm tired of doing these chores without the proper tools. They are fairly inexpensive to buy, and save sanity points every time they are used. And believe me, I can use all the sanity points I can get these days!