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.

Spring Cleaning

This post originally appeared in my now defunct "Mom's View" blog.  I moved it to this blog at the request of my kids, who wanted to have all of the various posts that accompanied their high school years in one place.  I've matched the publication dates here to their original post date.  If you're reading these posts, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to go back through them all! 

I should be cleaning the house right now, but I decided to take a break and write for a while.  Okay, I'm procrastinating.  With graduation looming, the house needs to be cleaned.  I decided I start in the basement - in the family room.  It's a disaster area.  Literally.  We had some flooding over the winter downstairs.  While we've dealt with some of the damage, much of our stuff was just tossed to the side while we attempted to stop the onslaught of flood waters.

The source of the flooding is evident- our house was built in the 1970's.  I called a plumber out after the flood, he took a look at the house and said

Two Things need to be fixed before you start renovating the basement:
1) The house has settled.  You need to call in a professional to re-grade the slope around the house and then you need to add new landscaping.  Those bushes planted next to the foundation are the original bushes, aren't they?  Most likely, the roots are tampering with your waterproofing on the foundation.

2) Replace the gutters.

Okay, so we still haven't tackled the landscaping.  I want to be able to pay cash for the landscaping, I don't want to do it on credit.  My goal is to have $1,000 in cash before we contact someone.  We are very close to achieving that goal.  I don't even want to talk about the gutters.  I know they need to be done, but the roof will need to be done at the same time, and I'd really like to add a porch onto the front of the house at the same time.  That is not going to be a cheap endeavor!

But the fact remains that I still need to clean out the family room before graduation.

I began early this morning.  I've found notebook paper.  Lots of notebook paper, scattered all over the basement.  Nothing is written on it, it's just evenly spread across the floor.  Lots and lots of old e-mails.  Those are gone now.  I found the smashed remains of an old Easter basket, and socks.  Oh my heavens, the socks.  I know where the other end of the black hole for socks on the East Coast is now- it is in my family room.  I am currently running a washer load full of socks.  I seriously doubt if any of them have a mate, but I'm willing to sort through them and see what matches up.

Pencils.  So far, I've liberated 100 pencils.  They are all sharpened, and the erasers are all hardened, but I don't think we're going to have to buy any new pencils in this house again, ever.

I am curious what other treasures I will find down there while I'm cleaning.  I'm beginning to think of this as a treasure hunt.  Wouldn't it be nice if I find a couple thousand dollars while I'm at it?