Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Everything but the kitchen sink

I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their support after losing my friend Holland last week. We had a three-day weekend in honor of Presidents' day this week and it seemed like a good way to keep going with life and honor Holland's spirit of joie de vivre was to do something fun. In my case, that was some decluttering!

It's been a long time since I've decluttered or organized anything so I wanted to start with something small that would be a quick and easy project to finish. I hadn't taken a look at the cabinet under the kitchen sink since we moved in last year. It's become a bit of a dumping ground.

Everything squeezed in. Mostly.
Everything on the floor.

It amounted to: a wire basket drawer, a sink plunger, several boxes of trash bags, three vases, two containers of detergent, the ingredients for more detergent, a caulking fun, a paper towel holder, a dustpan, and baby oil for the cabinets (works like a charm!).

I recycled the metal basket drawer that was half rusted. I removed the metal tracks that were screwed into the bottom of the cabinet so now we can actually crawl underneath the sink without hunks of metal digging into our backs when we have to change the filter or fix the disposal. It opened up a huge amount of room. I hung the little dust pan up inside the door. Then I found these.
Granite cleaners and leather cleaners. Shame we don't have a granite countertop OR leather furniture!
All of those were freebies. I took them into work and gave them away. People snapped them up. I don't even know how I ended up with them! Does that ever happen to you? Stuff just sneaks into your house?

Okay, so it doesn't look much better with everything back in. But at least there's a little space and I was able to put a liner down to keep any spills from ruining the cabinet.

I'm happy. Now, to figure out how to keep it this way! How do you keep everything under your sink from getting disorganized? What would you have kept or trashed that I didn't?

6 comments:

  1. The cleaning cupboard under the sink is on my tidy/declutter list too...I'm not sure that the is a lot to get rid of, but I need to organise it in such a way that I can reach everything in it, and hopefully it wiifm thus stay tidy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I haven't looked under there in a long time.... last time I looked there were way too many cleaning products, like partially full bottles of the same thing. Several different kinds of strainers and I don't know. There is a lot of stuff under there-a lot more than you have. Our space is bigger too.

    I also have a large stack of rags that keep getting bigger because hubby keeps using the kitchen towels as rags so then I have to buy more. We finally had a talk that not all cloth under the kitchen sink was rags--the black towels that match the black and white kitchen are not rags! Well, except for the ones that have been bleached now (which are all of them except the one last hold out). I know hubby remembered this lesson because now one of the new this past fall bathroom towels has been bleached. *sigh*

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. oh dear! you know how some people embroider their towels? Maybe we need to get you ones that have embroidered on them, "dear husband, these are the kitchen towels, not rags!"

      Delete
  3. Like you, I also store cleaning products and even tools under my kitchen sink. I can't think of any other place to keep those things; it's the perfect spot. Whenever I need a certain item, I'll just look for it under the sink. For me, it's okay to do that as long as the items don't bear upon the pipes. Maintaining organization helps too.

    Darryl Iorio

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're so right about the pipes. We've definitely learned the hard way how important it is to be able to get to those pipes in a hurry! We don't even keep the trash can under the sink now because of that.

      Delete

Please be kind :o)

If you try to advertise your online business by writing a comment on this blog, please don't bother because I will delete it.