Spring Cleaning: The Kitchen and Utility Room

I worked more on my kitchen cupboards today. I was mostly inspired by the book Confessions of an Organized Homemaker.

I had read about creating "centers" in your kitchen before, mostly from Emilie Barnes. I had previously organized my parents' kitchen into centers, and it worked beautifully.

Unconsciously, I had already somewhat organized my own kitchen into logical centers. So today I was just fine-tuning "centers" and locating them where they would be more convenient. Oh, and did I mention tossing some things?

I love my drawer organizers. They were made for people like me!! Check out what a little organization did to the inconvenient cupboard above my stove:



And here's a closeup of the left side to show how I stacked two of the organizers. Normally I wouldn't stack them, but the bottom one is level enough that it won't tip over, and I don't use the items on the bottom often enough to worry about the inconvenience.

I used old plastic Gerber baby food containers to store the last little bits of spices that were in huge containers taking up tons of my space. I labeled them with masking tape so I could tell what was in each. They stacked very nicely at the back of the righthand side. My main spice area is on my countertop in an alphabetized spice rack, so this is just backup and isn't used on a regular basis (so it's okay to be hard to get to).

You'll probably notice I stacked two organizers on the righthand side, too. I was able to get away with that because all the spice bottles on the bottom were the same height. I use the items on the top more often, so this seemed the logical way to store them.

Now onto my proudest achievement of the week: the utility room (aka the main entrance). For before pictures, see this post. Here is the finished product:



Notice the absence of everything (except for the oversized laundry detergent which is hidden behind the door) on the surfaces. There is an added bonus to this: I did laundry today and was able to fold and sort it all on top the chest freezer. Talk about convenient!

I'm feeling so much better now that I'm getting control over clutter!