Hello! It's been a minute since my last post! Sometimes life just likes to step in and take over for a bit! From traveling out of state with my son's hockey team to a lovely illness that took me out for almost 3 weeks, my attention has been pretty scattered. The good news though is that I have actually been getting some decluttering done! Woo hoo!
Last month, I began decluttering the kitchen. I'm not done yet...thanks to life's crazy adventures, but I'm really excited about the progress that I've made and the accidental bonus decluttering that happened as a result. What's also great is that every space that I have decluttered, has stayed that way!
What have I done recently? For starters, I decluttered 3 cupboards and the stove drawer which unintentionally led to me decluttering a sideboard in the living room and part of our basement. It all started with a bottom cupboard next to our oven that has pull out shelving. This is where I like to keep pots and pans and some baking dishes. Here is what it used to look like. (Excuse the crooked picture. Photography is not my strength!) It became a catchall for other baking items and everything was very crowded. Not to mention that the weight of all of the baking dishes was starting to take its toll on the shelves themselves.
As I started tackling all of the different areas, I really focused in on what I wanted to use those areas for. As I was taking items out of cupboards, I realized that I had 4 large glass baking dishes and 4 smaller square glass baking dishes. I do use a couple of them pretty regularly, but that's it! A couple. Not all of them. I decided that I was going keep 2 of the larger baking dishes and 2 of the square baking dishes and donate the rest. Honestly, I don't use the square ones very often at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if I were to give one of those up as well. There were other baking items in there too like muffin tins, cooling racks, and loaf pans that I only use once or twice a year for holiday baking. Since I do use those items and want to keep them, they were set aside to be stored together in a bin in the basement. The black hole basement. Well....clearly if I am intentionally storing items that I want and will need to use in the future, something needs to be done about the basement chaos so those things can be easily accessed!! More about that later.
Back to the cupboards. Springform pans, a stoneware dutch oven, a stoneware baking dish, several cake platters, pie dishes, a soup tureen, and a large glass drink dispenser were other items that were taking up precious space and just not getting used, so I donated all of those. The soup tureen we got as a wedding gift. I loved the idea of it when I registered for it, but in almost 17 years of marriage....it has never been used!! Turns out, when I make soup, I serve it from the pot it's made in (or the container its purchased in...ha!). And I'm not serving the fancy 5 course meals to my dinner guests that I once dreamt about. If that ever changes, and I need to serve soup in a fancy lidded pedestal serving bowl, I'm sure I can invest in a soup toureen at a later date. I kept 2 out of 4 cake platters and only 1 out of 5 pie dishes!! How was all of this stuff even fitting?! As I continued the process of evaluating each piece and deciding what to keep and what to let go of, my donation pile was really starting to grow. This is where the bonus decluttering started. In our basement, I knew we had bins of baking dishes and entertaining dishes that we were either no longer planning on using or that could be combined with what we planned on keeping. Having like items stored in multiple places is part of the reason why I never know where anything is! There are too many places to look! The other reason my kitchen decluttering got redirected to the basement was if I was going to make a donation of kitchen/baking/entertaining items, I wanted to do it once. We wound up finding and pulling out about 12 bins. Some had table linens, some had seasonal entertaining dishes, some had products from my days of selling Pampered Chef. All were relevant to what I was trying to declutter in the kitchen. Well....there's a sideboard in our living room that also has seasonal entertaining dishes, table linens, and baking dishes. Enough was enough.
After going through the bins, kitchen, and sideboard, we wound up filling up the back of our van with donations and throwing away several bags full of broken, chipped and stained items. I wish I had a before picture of our sideboard. Sometimes when you're in the rhythm of getting massive decluttering done, before photos become an afterthought. Ooops. I promise to be better going forward. Our sideboard looked and felt like a game of serving dish jenga. Everytime I tried to get something out, I wound up having to unload a whole shelf to get to what I wanted without breaking or chipping anything. Every time I put something away, it was just ridiculous. Look now! Easy peasy serving dish retrieval!
The 12 bins from the basement were whittled down to 6. We then cleared a set of shelves in the basement for those 6 bins and my seasonal decorations. Now I know exactly where all of my table linens, entertaining platters, and baking supplies are...and we've made it easy to get to. I'll post all about the basement at a later date, so no pictures yet! Check out these donations!!
The pots and pans cupboard is super functional now. It's actually enjoyable putting them away when I do the dishes because they have a designated, decluttered spot just for them! Also, I know that my main focus right now is to declutter and that organizing will come later, but simply putting away the pans with the pans, the pots with the pots, and having somewhere for the lids to go is making such a huge difference in keeping this cupboard functional!!
I'm feeling so inspired to keep going!!! I think I hear a kitchen drawer or two calling my name!
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