40 Bags in 40 Days Challenge

At the beginning of Lent, I began a 40 bag challenge.  My goal was to get rid of 40 bags of junk during the 40 days of Lent.  You can read my original post about this here:
http://mini-van-mom.blogspot.com/2015/02/40-bags-in-40-days.html

I had gotten the idea of holding a 40 bag challenge from the White House Black Shutters Blog.  You can read Anne Marie's original post about the 40 bag challenge here: http://www.whitehouseblackshutters.com/40-bags-in-40-days-2015/

I just want to say here, I got massively sidetracked.  Oh, I got bags and bags of crap out of my house.  Trash bags, Goodwill bags, bags for the craft group at church, bags for the preschool my kids went to, and bags to the public library.  All told, I didn't quite come up with 40 bags.  I only got rid of 30 bags.

The problem began when I started cleaning out my kitchen.  We bought my house from my In-Laws.  They never completely moved out.  10 years later, I am still shoving my stuff into cabinets around their stuff.  I began my cleaning journey in the kitchen.  And ended it there.  Truth be told, I never really made it out of there.

I emptied out every single cabinet, cupboard, and drawer.  I sent stuff to the food bank - wait, I didn't add those bags into the count.  That was 3 boxes, so 33?

I threw out or gave away more stuff than I care to admit.  (Hello, 30 bags of crap total, and 20 of them were from my kitchen.)

I neatened things up.  I put down new shelf paper.  I added some beautiful dividers into the cabinets to have the flat pans sit straight up - instead of on top of the toaster oven, where they've been housed for years.

I added one of those nifty metal organizers that holds pot lids.

Organized the spices, collated the partials into one single bottle so I could free up more space.

Husband even made some moveable dividers for rotation of our canned goods in the pantry.  He's still working on one for the second shelf down.  These dividers are great because they take full advantage of the depth of the cabinet.  The shelves were so deep that the traditional rotating shelves that I was using left about 18 inches of unused space in front.

I went through all of the plastic containers and matched up lids and bottoms.  (Whoa, took way longer than I thought it would.)

I recycled the 5+ years of phone books I had sitting inside of another cabinet, and I organized all of the office supplies I had stored down there.  Actually, once the phone books were out, there really wasn't that much stuff in that cabinet, anyway.  (Wait, I forgot to add the phone books to the list.  That was 2 recycling bins full of old phone books.  So, that takes the total up to 35?)

Now, husband and I are looking at the awkward cabinets above the island and thinking that it would make sense to take the cabinets down.  They're all empty now, anyway.  Taking the cabinets down would open up a serious amount of horizontal space, and give us a place to slice veggies and maybe even make the kitchen lighter and brighter - we currently only have space to slice and dice on top of the stove.  It's not the best of arrangements.  And if we did remove the cabinets, we'd take them downstairs to the laundry room and add a counter or table top to them- thereby giving us a space to fold and sort laundry IN the laundry room.  Could it be?  Could we actually kill 2 birds with one stone?


This entire endeavor is beginning to read a little like the book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie!"

Graduation is how many weeks away?  Could we get this done before then?