On organization

About a week ago, a friend of mine posted a link to 52 Weeks to an Organized Home. I love the idea behind this: organization needs to happen in small bites to be successful; otherwise you may overwhelm yourself. I have decided that we will work on tackling our organization at home, though not necessarily in the same exact chunks suggested in the challenges.

Anyone that knows -D and I knows that we have a lot of stuff. I generally try to keep things clean, but we definitely have a lot of clutter. Moving from apartment to apartment on an annual-ish basis, we got really good about purging things we hadn't used in a while. Apartment buildings are also handy for disposal: chances are there is someone willing to take what you don't want anymore. Living in a house for 3 years now, we haven't had a good purge in a while. It's time. And while we're at it, we may as well reorder what we are keeping.

So this weekend, we tackled our kitchen organization. Here's our kitchen for reference:


Our counters have always generally been a little overrun. While we designated some space for working, the counters have housed: coffee pot, cutting board (beautiful wood one made by my dad), microwave, toaster oven, stand mixer, and all the oils/salt/pepper/wine for cooking. To the left of the sink, we have a pad for drying dishes; this space also generally houses recyclables, even though the recycle bin isn't that far away.

When we moved in, -D emptied the kitchen boxes into cabinets. They sort of made sense, but not really. We've been using them as such for 2 years now. While I knew that pasta went in a lower cabinet, along with rice, freeze pops, fruit roll-ups, and mashed potatoes, others may not have understood that canned goods (soup, beans, tomatoes, etc.) went in the upper cabinet, along with unopened salad dressing, stuffing mix, crackers, pudding, and Pam spray. Cutting boards mingled with the loaf pan, and soda hung out with the bread machine. Makes perfect sense, right? And don't get me started on the closet, with its lonely shelf too high for me to reach.

So thinking about the organization challenges for the kitchen, and thinking about our use of the kitchen. Instead of doing each section (counters, dish storage, and food storage) separately, I decided we needed to do it all to get it done and done right.

We went out and got a Closetmaid wire shelf system for the closet. It came out a little pricier than we had thought it might, but I have to say it's well worth it. The shelf brackets (the triangular piece that holds and supports the shelves) were one of the biggest contributors to the cost. You can expect to pay a little bit for the shelves and the mounting bracket (the piece that attaches to the wall), but the brackets were $10 a piece, times two per shelf, times four shelves... you get the idea. Despite this, we have a modular, adjustable setup that we can change, add to, what have you, if we decide down the road we need to redo it.

Just make sure you mount everything into a stud (no, we didn't learn the hard way - we were smrt before we started and got the stud finder).

I unfortunately didn't get a before pic, but imagine a self-standing wine rack jammed in a closet with crap filled in around it, and some lobster plates on a shelf well over my 5'1" head. Here's the after picture:



Stand mixer and toaster oven no longer take over the counters. I even picked up a couple of totes for the stand mixer attachments and another for my canning supplies. I have so much cabinet space now I almost don't know what to do with it.

Speaking of cabinets: I reorganized those as well. I switched the tupperware and lower food cabinets, so the food is all vertically aligned now, rather than being at separate ends of the kitchen. I threw out all of the tupperware with no lids, and lids with no tupperware. Baking vessels live happily in their own cabinet without the cutting boards. And the food makes sense now. There is a lunch/dinner cabinet (complete with condiments and other supplies), and a breakfast/snack cabinet.

We do plan to make some pullout shelves for our pots and pans, but those'll take some time. I also admit I have yet to attack the baking cabinet. But this was lots of progress for us for one weekend.

Hopefully it'll be a kick in the pants to deal with the walls in there next.

I'll close with a pic of our gorgeous walls, after we took down the (first layer of) wainscoting:


Until next time (hopefully not in six months!)

--Lisa.