Monday, January 7, 2013

Organizing challenge-Kitchen space

This week's organizing challenge takes us to the kitchen. I don't know why our kitchen gets so unorganized when we built in so many features when we remodeled the kitchen nearly 10 years ago to maximize the organization of it. The worst clutter catcher happens to be the kitchen island. It measures 4' x 8' and becomes the surface that catches everything.

One of the features that I love the most about it is the reflectiveness of the granite. When everything is cleared off and it is shining I love how the tile work reflects in the granite, this is the main reason to keep it all cleared off as much as possible.

I like #7 of Angie at EasyLivingMom tips for ending clutter that she shared about clearing counters daily. She says "if you get in the habit of clearing your counters every night you will not run into a situation where you have so much clutter to clean that you don't know where to start." I am going to set that as my goal for this space. I love to see it all shiny and beautiful.

The pull out shelves of the pantry makes it so easy to see everything that I have in there. When we designed the pantry we made the shelves of varying heights. The top shelves are farther apart to accommodate taller items such as boxes of cereal and jars that hold my spaghetti etc and as the shelves go downwards they are arranged to hold shorter items such as canned goods, in this way we maximized how much we could store in this area. It does get a little bit out of sorts when I am not on top of putting everything away where it is supposed to go.
I did a good clean up and organizing of this area by putting like items with like and discarding out of date items and consolidating other items. It didn't take all that long and now I can see what I have plenty of and what I need to put on my grocery shopping list for the next run to the store.

I also have a problem with this corner of the counters getting clogged with clutter.
I moved everything off first of all and gave it a good scrubbing and then put the minimum back.
It's looking good for now. I will have to see how it works out.

I still have 3 more areas that I want to work on when I can get back to it and those areas are the lazy Susan that holds the Tupperware items and small appliances, under the sink with the cleaning products and last is the cabinet under the microwave where the blender, extra jars and odds and ends get put when there isn't a home for them else where.

I hope you enjoyed my reorganizing post and if you would vote for me on The New Year's Organizing Revolution I would really appreciate it. My number is 7. Thank you. Have a good week.