Unclutter Your Kitchen
1 Material
2 Days
Easy
I am truly not a hoarder, but we have accumulated way too much stuff in our 30 years of marriage. Our home has an attic, as well as crawlspace storage, so it’s been very easy to stash stuff away without realizing exactly what we are stashing and what we are accumulating.
When we undertook a major declutter, we wanted some incentive to keep us motivated and we came up with weighing how much clutter we removed and thereby how much lighter our home would feel.
We removed over 1,000 pounds of clutter from our home over the course of 4 weeks. This is the 2nd week and we focused on decluttering our kitchen.
For each area you will be decluttering:
- Bring a bag/box for TRASH, for DONATE , for RECYCLE, for RELOCATE and , if you really need it, for STORAGE.
See here for a list of places to donate your gently used items or recycle other items.
- Bring a dustbuster or vacuum, rags and cleaning solution.
- Put on your favorite Pandora station, CD or radio station
- If it motivates you, take note of what you toss and the weight of all the stuff leaving your home. My home is already breathing easier with some of the weight lifted.
- You can deduct the items you donate on your taxes; a discard sheet can help to keep track of that. Just estimate values of the items as you go along. You can print one off on the very first post in the series here.
Unclutter Your Nest: The Kitchen
If you are at all like me, the kitchen is a clutter gold mine. I am on record as being a sucker for kitchen gadgets. Maybe ‘sucker’ is too nice a word…the truth is that I think I have a kitchen gadget ‘problem’.
Here’s how I went about shedding 117 pounds of kitchen clutter:
- I picked up every single item in all of my kitchen drawers and some of my cabinets and laid them on the counter. I skipped the cabinets that housed my everyday dishes as I use them…everyday… and know exactly what is there.
- By laying everything out and picking everything up, I could easily see where I had duplicate items.
- I had 3 different versions of handheld lemon juicers; couldn’t tell you why.
- Somehow our family of 4 had accumulated 17 ( yes, 17) travel mugs! I guess I was thinking that if we each had 4 hands, we’d have 1 spare in case one broke? Don’t know. In any case, we picked out the best 6 and sent the other 11 to find good homes elsewhere.
- I had some items that I just never used and can’t imagine ever using.
- How many baking dishes does a family of 4 need? I had 4 of those white Corning casserole bakers, 3 of those clear Pyrex bakers, several Pampered Chef baking dishes as well as a couple other more decorative bakers. In laying them all out, I was easily able to realize which ones I use on a regular basis and which ones haven’t been out of the cabinet for years.
- I researched several sites to figure out which knives I need in my kitchen. The general consensus (from sources such as Epicurious, Real Simple and Huffington Post) is that there are 4 basic knifes you need:
- An 8” – 10” Chef’s Knife
- A 3 ½” Paring Knife
- A 6” Serrated Blade Knife
- A 6”-8” A Boning Knife
By going through this process, drawer by drawer and cabinet by cabinet, I was able to lighten my kitchen by 117 pounds! Not a bad day's (well, OK...a couple of day's) work.
Resources for this project:
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Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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1 comment
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Great job!!! It takes the right mind set to purge and it looks like you did a great job. I'm working on my kitchen - have done the spice/seasonings cabinet and the pantry which was huge...now we'll be working on drawers and getting rid of stuff we don't need. Luckily, my husband is a professional chef so I look to him to decide what we need and don't need! Thanks for the inspiration! :-)
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