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?

Cleaning out the Kitchen

I began the #40bagsin40days Lenten challenge a couple of weeks ago.  I admit.  I had dreams of cleaning out my entire house.

Turns out, I've gotten bogged down in my kitchen.  There's a lot more "stuff" in there than I thought there would be.

While I've been at it, husband and I decided to go ahead and fix all of the little stuff that has bothered us about that space since we moved into this house.  It's been on our "to do" list for 9 years now, but it's never been a priority.

We've emptied out well over half of the cabinets.  We've gone through each and every item and decided what we do and don't use.  Items that needed to go away have been given away.  We cleaned out the cupboard which is just behind the kitchen door, and husband is in the middle of building a custom designed rack so that we can rotate our canned goods in and out without losing stuff in the very back corners of the cupboard.  Items that need to be corralled, like the Easter Egg stuff is all in bins, and the bottom shelves of the cupboards contain these bins of items that are not used often, but that we like to keep track of.

I even went so far as to go through the spices.  We had five jars of Turmeric - each with a little less than a quarter of spice left.  Hey, presto, change-o, I consolidated all of the various jars of Turmeric into one!  Sadly, there were many more extraneous jars of spices - not just the Turmeric - that could be consolidated.  In all, I ended up recycling over 20 jars and little containers of spices that had been hogging space in our cabinets.  I can now actually see what I have on the shelves!  That's an unusual feeling!

Yesterday, I emptied out another cabinet that I've been meaning to get to since we moved in here.  There were 5 sets of drip pans for an electric stove in there.  We have a smooth top electric range.  Not sure how long those pans have been sitting in there, but they are gone now!  This cabinet is going to end up housing my pans and cookie sheets that are currently crammed into the drawer under the oven.  I want to store them vertically, if I can, so I'm looking around for ways to hold the upright without spending a fortune.

I still have the largest project left - getting at the island in the kitchen.  It's an awkward set up - the island itself has cabinets that hang down from the ceiling and come to 12" above the counter top.  No space to do anything here except pile stuff.  When we moved in, our intent was to pull down those cabinets over top of the island and move them down into the laundry room to make a nice island there to fold laundry.  I believe we're about to make it happen.  With the space we've opened up in the other cabinets, we should be able to move everything out of those upper cabinets and take them down.  I don't think it will happen before Easter, but it will happen before graduation.  Finally, one of the larger visions we had for this space when we moved in here - opening up the kitchen - will be done!

I have added a Kitchen Remodel board to my Pinterest Boards.  I don't honestly think we'll be able to pull off a lot of these ideas, but it's fun to look at these great ideas and dream!

The bag count so far?  9 bags to Goodwill.  1 to the Public Library.  2 bags to a mission trip to Guatemala.  4 bags of trash. 1 bin of recycling.

Random Pictures

It was a warm and wonderful 4 below this morning when I left the house!  That's not counting the windchill, which took the temperature down to 15 below zero.  We're not used to this kind of cold in Maryland!  I wasn't sure the car was going to start this morning!

Remember these?  We went out to dinner a couple of weeks ago and had a functioning jukebox on our table!  What a hoot!

Valentine's Day Flowers from our boss, on the Reference Desk for everyone to see.

Isn't this just beautiful? 

#40bagsin40days.  I cleaned out all 4 of these drawers yesterday. Not only that, but I also put down new shelf paper, washed the silverware divider, and pulled out the BABY SPOONS!!  (My kids are in their late teens and early 20's!  We don't need those anymore!)

So, not only did I get 2 bags of items to go off to the thrift store yesterday, I got this entire bag of trash out of those drawers.  No big deal you say, right?  Wrong.  You see that second drawer in the photo?  The one that is partially open?  Umm, that entire bag of trash was stuffed into that drawer.  That was my "catch all" or "junk" drawer.  Lots of junk in there.

40 Bags in 40 Days

One of my friends posted this on her Facebook page this morning.  The blogger who originated the idea is Ann Marie from the White House Black Shutters blog.

In a nutshell, the idea behind this project is to clear out your house, and get rid of 40 bags of stuff during the 40 days of Lent.  The bags can go anywhere:  Goodwill, the dump, consignment stores, preschools, homeless shelters.  The idea is to get 40 bags of  *stuff*  out of your house.  How cool is that?  You can combine spring cleaning along with some Lenten sacrifice!

 

http://www.whitehouseblackshutters.com/ 

Take a good look at Ann Marie's blog: http://www.whitehouseblackshutters.com/40-bags-in-40-days-2015/.

I've got my first bag finished today.  It's a small bag, and it's headed off to Goodwill this afternoon!

A Lenten challenge I can really get into!  Will you join me?