Saturday, February 16, 2013

House Organizing - Kitchen

One of the projects I'm working on in 2013 is organizing my house. I don't have a lot of stuff (at least I don't think I do), and for the most part, things are were they belong. But I found a website that I'm hoping will help me re-organize/declutter some areas of the house. 
Each day there is an assignment that you're supposed to spend up to 15 minutes on. Sometimes I can do the day's task in just a couple minutes and others it might take me more than 15. Also, if I don't have enough time on a particular day, I'll do another day's task and come back to that one, most often on a weekend.
 
I like having the list at a glance, so I printed the monthly calendar and put it on the frig. You can see there were a few days last month that I skipped. Those were days that I either hadn't gotten to yet or didn't need to do because I don't have that area in my house...like a pantry or organizing toys. 
 
The kitchen was a huge area last month. I had a junk drawer that had accumulated way too much stuff. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
 This is what it looks like now. I had actually organized it once and then decided a few days later that I still wasn't happy with it so I cleaned it again.
Another day it was time for cookbooks so that's when I tackled that and the other half of the drawer that had become full of junk. 
Much better. I moved the container from the drawer mentioned earlier into this one. 
Ever since I moved into this house, I haven't been happy with the drawer space in the kitchen. I just put stuff where it fit and never got around to moving it. The silverware and cooking utensils were all in one drawer. So on the day that the task was to organize the cookbooks, I was able to clear a drawer out by moving them elsewhere. I'm not a big cookbook user so all the extras didn't need to be taking up prime real estate in a drawer.

I bought a few organization dividers to help keep things looking neat.

And then last but not least, I moved the towels/dishcloths into the old cookbook drawer which was bigger and was finally able to separate the cooking utensils into two drawers.
 
After a couple weeks, I'm now used to where I moved things and don't open the wrong drawer first.