Since I started this site over a year ago, I have been doing things here and there to clean out the clutter in our home. While we were on vacation we rented a house that was nice, clean, and had only the necessities. Coming back to our own home I realized how far we still really have to go. So now it is time to get serious.
Kitchen counters left view
I am going to do a series of posts on organizing, called Operation Home Organization. If I haven’t done one in a while, I am going to ask you to keep me on task. Please also let me know if there are any specific areas that you’d like to see me cover and maybe we could tackle them together.
Let me start by saying I am far from an organizational expert. I really struggle with keeping things for our family neat and organized. If you are a beginner like me, I am hoping that recording my experiences will be helpful for you. I will also be including some photos that might inspire you.
Between work, a husband, and two small children I don’t have as much time as I would like to devote to this project. The tasks I will be doing will be quick and hopefully can fit in with your busy schedule. I also do not have a ton of money to devote to it, so the fixes I come up with should be rather inexpensive.
Room #1 – The Kitchen
The first task I am going to take on is in the kitchen. In our house the kitchen is the room where you enter, where people gather whenever we have people over, and where we all sit down to eat dinner together every night . The areas where we have the biggest problems with clutter are the counters, cabinets, by the sink, drawers, the pantry, and the fridge.
Kitchen counters middle view
Task #1 – De-cluttering the Counters
One of the problems we face is that the mail ends up getting stacked up on our kitchen counters. To address this problem, I have added a basket for mail.
Some of the other products we used to organize our counters are a spoon rest, an utensil caddy, a paper towel holder, and a couple of knife blocks.
We used to keep bananas on top of the fridge. I have moved fruit such as bananas, oranges, and apples to a bowl.
I tried to keep only the things we use everyday on the counters and put everything else away in the cabinets (we’ll worry about the clutter in there soon.)
The great thing about de-cluttering your counters is that it is such a visable thing. Because you can see the results it should encourage you to keep going to do more organizing.
Kitchen counters right view
In future posts in this series we will move on to some of the other problem areas in the kitchen – cabinets, by the sink, drawers, the pantry, and the fridge. Please contact me if you have ideas or products that you think I would find helpful for any of these areas.
