Daily Hits of Happy: June 3, 2020 - 264 - "Leave of Absence House Project #2"

DeCluttering My Own Plans First...

The post for House Project #1 was on April 14. My plan was to post about a house project weekly.

Well, here we are six weeks later and I've plowed all the way to: Project #2!

Making the Cupboards More Bare

My original plan was just to clean up the under-stair closet. (We call it the under-stair closet...'cause it's, ya know, under the stairs.)

When I look at the Before pictures they don't look as bad as they felt. They looked messy, but in my mind, they seemed like they were way more full and chaotic than the pictures make them appear.

First Rule of Organizing

I see now that the reason I felt so confused and overwhelmed when I went in there was because the space broke the First Rule of Organizing:

1-Store like with like.

There's a bag of tortilla chips on top of some baking supplies and boxes of pasta. Cereal next to a sideways-stored mini food processor. Tea and maple syrup sit atop a food scale. There are two boxes of coffee pods...on different shelves. You get the idea.

It was tough to put things up and even tougher to find things.

2-Do not store stuff you don't use.

We don't drink Fanta. We don't drink Diet Caffeine-free Pepsi. We often end up with partial cases of soda from various parties or particular house guests.

In addition to being a waste of prime shelf real estate, the fact is: sodas don't last long on shelves. They explode...then they sit there in their cardboard boxes oozing onto the shelf...making disgusting black mold spots that eat into shelves. (And if it's not diet they begin to attract ants and make the mess gooey in addition to moldy and gross.)

Then you not only need to scrape and scrub them off, but also be thrilled you bought that Ikea shelf liner to cover the spots.

If you wouldn't buy it yourself, do not put it in your cupboard. Give it away, throw it away...whatever it takes - just don't keep it.

This is a self-lecture more than anything. It's a bad habit of ours. I think we think that friend will come over sometimes soon, or we'll spontaneously develop a taste for...(fill in the blank for the left-behind item.) Either we eat/drink it right away...or we ditch it.

All Projects Grow

I realized there are 3 similar storage spaces for our kitchen. The closet above, a cupboard with pull-out shelves, and a corner cupboard with a Useful (wink, wink) Susan. I decided I'd have to clean them all out since there were duplicate items between the spaces. I needed to see what I had and figure out how to use the space better.

Here's the Before of the Pull-out pantry to the right of the stove:

I wish I'd taken a Before picture of the corner cupboard. It was a disaster. We'd been using it, mainly, for canned food. Canned food on a round shelf does not work. We never knew what we had.

Again we had a mixture of categories of items...all living anywhere we can shove them without stuff falling off the shelves when we pull them in and out.

Once I had it all spread out on the cabinets, dining room table, and floor, I got paranoid that some emergency would call me away before I got this all put back together. I stayed up until 4 a.m. to get it finished. (Also the idea of waking up to this daunting site wasn't appealing.)

One of the most surprising things was just how many appliances we had shoved in that one closet. The shelves are not very deep...yet they somehow got piled up enough that a whole row and a half of appliances were barely visible.

Really, how many appliances we had...period. I'm pretty resistant to buying things I think I won't use often...but some of these items are exactly that. I have a lot of reasons to use a food processor...and somewhere along the line we acquired two of them. (I think a big and small one came together...from Costco, probably.) But I have hardly ever used them. I figure by the time I dig out the thing and then do the cleanup, I could have already sliced, chopped, or diced whatever I needed and been done with it.

Maybe now that they are more accessible I'll use them more often.

Now I Go To Our Cupboards Just to Stare At Them

One of the reasons I'd been putting this off is those (cheap) shelves were sagging badly. I needed to either get new ones or cut pieces of wood to brace them. When I suddenly had that 'enough is enough' feeling and wanted to get the project done right then it was getting late in the afternoon and I didn't feel like going to a store, or running a saw...so I improvised with paint cans and paint stick wedges.

It's not a great solution, but at least our pantries are all functional. Turns out the shelf we'd stored soda we didn't drink is a great place for canned goods. I thought we had an overwhelming number of cans of things, but when they weren't stacked in the corner turntable there aren't that many. Only a couple of them have anything behind them. They can all be visible.

And, yeah, I've been testing out different brands of tonic water. I need to pick one and get only that to minimize the clutter.

Turns out corner cupboards aren't very good for storing much of anything...Useful Susan or not. They are awkward spaces where things want to fall to the sides. We're going to attempt to keep these down to just a few categories of things.

So far it's all functioning a million times better. We've got to stay vigilant to keep it from getting back where it was. The tricky time is when we get groceries and put them away in a hurry. That's when systems go away and chaos starts to sneak in.