Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Decluttering my kitchen.

One of my mottos is "Manage your stuff or manage your people". That's how I remind myself that if there is too much stuff for me to manage it's really hard to manage the people. Sometimes I do a better job than others at holding myself to that idea. The issue seems pressed at the moment seeing as how we are expecting baby number 7 at the end of the summer. The last couple weeks I have been purging our house one room at a time. Last week I took 3 boxes and 3 big garbage bags to the thrift store! Shockingly most of it came from my daughters' bedroom. Their are five of them sharing a bedroom, and at least two show packrat tendencies (they keep garbage, actual garbage as in wrappers and other junk they want to look at!!). They must get this from their dad because I LOVE to get rid of stuff. I love gettting rid of stuff so much that I sometimes get rid of stuff I probably should have kept. My husband has been known to tell me, "you can get rid of that, but we're not buying another one in a year", in attempt to make me stop and think before loading a bag of "junk" into my car and hauling it off.

It's so much easier to organize and stay organized when you just don't have as much stuff. This morning I tackled my kitchen. I decided I was not going to keep more than I have room to store. I am tired of throwing something into a cupboard and closing it as fast as I can hoping to avoid an avalanche (like my freezer). I drug an empty box into the kitchen and pitched in everything I haven't used in a year. Somethings I thought, "I might need this if I ....", or "well, I would really like to start..." But I am good at talking myself out of that. I pitched my popcorn maker (we always microwave, to my best friends shame), my hand mixer (which I have not touched since I was given a stand mixer), and dozens of other odds and ends that were just taking up space. The junk drawer was the worst. I think I almost lost my life in their a time or two, but I pulled through in the end! The end result makes it SO worth getting rid of all the crap! :) Tomorrow, the guest room...maybe.


The End Result!!

See, I'm not even hiding junk over here!

I am blessed to have this hidden corner where all the uggo necessities live.

The Junk Drawer!! Serious transformation. Turns out the "junk" was mostly my kids' garbage. Good Riddens!

The avalanche cupboard. See that, even extra room!

2 comments:

  1. Your kitchen looks great! I, too, have a child who shows tendencies of being a packrat. We have to regularly go through her "stuff" in order to keep her possessions manageable!

    ReplyDelete