A bank holiday Friday and beautiful weather – can’t ask for more than that! I spent practically a whole day gardening and the girls helped me so much. We focused on the corner which has basically been used as a dumping ground for years. Here is a small section before we started…
Before decluttering the corner
There were garden toys from when the girls were small, a bag of sand where the bag was disintegrated, an old wooden chair with part of the tree growing through it, weeds (some with thorns.. ouch), a fire pit, a grass container from an old lawn mower and general rubbish. The bonus finds were a bag of potting compost, pots and plastic troughs.
We worked hard and it took all afternoon, but it was very satisfying sweeping the path afterwards to reveal a nice little area. I had to stop to finish dinner, but this is what the corner looks like now… a very productive afternoon.
After decluttering the corner
I’ll need to plant something to grow up this trellis now.
The leg of lamb had been in the oven since 11am and it was really cooked well when we ate around 7pm.
I think it’s going to be another sunny day tomorrow so I might get some weeding done.
Since receiving this rolling pin as a present in 1990, it has spent most of its years in the back of the kitchen cupboard which is a shame. When we were sorting out the cupboards and drawers last weekend, my daughter encouraged me to leave the rolling pin out on the side. I said ‘but what about the box?’ She said ‘just throw it away’.
The rolling pin has been left out now which is fine but I’m trying to come up with reasons to keep the original box (it’s got as far as the back door so it’s almost made it to the recycling bin). It just needs that final push. At least I have a photo now! Maybe once the box has been thrown away it may force me to permanently keep the rolling pin out on the side.
Rolling out pastry
I made an apple pie today and rolling with this marble rolling pin is much easier than using the plain and cheaper wooden one. I think that the pastry ended up better as well. My daughter loved it!
Throwing boxes away
Do you throw boxes away for things you want to keep in the cupboards? This question isn’t limited to kitchen appliances, it’s just a general question to see if I can pick up any tips to stop my habit of keeping boxes.
This morning I woke up at 4.30am and just couldn’t go back to sleep. I thought I was going to be tired all day; however, I have had the most enjoyable day. I started off with the meditation that I usually try at nighttime to see if I could drift back off to sleep, but that didn’t help. This track was called ‘balance’ which was very appropriate to how the rest of my day ended up going. I felt very positive and energised and my day was one lovely step after the another…
I had a delightful early morning walk with my girls so that one of them could deliver a present to her friend (correct social distancing and safety practised of course). Blue skies, sunshine and great company
I attended an enjoyable half day zoom coaching course at work this morning – an additional side qualification I am working towards
I had the afternoon off and spent it in the garden with my youngest daughter. First we did drawing together for an hour and then she helped me to repot some plants. She enjoyed it more than she thought she would and we planned on doing some weeding and tidying up in the garden over the weekend.
I cuddled up with the girls and watched Monsters Inc. for the first time. I loved it!
I had a really good catch up with my mum over the phone
I made burgers (home-made.. yum)
I changed the tea cupboard around again as some of the teabags were too far out of reach. I moved one of the shelves up a notch and put cups/mugs on the left over two shelves and the same with teabags on the right.
I watching a couple of episodes of friends with my eldest daughter – we’re up to season four at the moment. I’ve seen them all before but she hasn’t.
I’ve now got to that point of the evening where I could either keep going or have an early night. I think it’s best that I do the latter as my eyes are feeling a bit heavy.
The sun was shining down on me whilst out walking this morning; however, the strong wind felt cold against my ears. I still kept walking (occasionally breaking into a light jog) as I needed the exercise. When I came back home there was what I can only describe as a lovely warm ‘chocolatey’ smell; it was evidence that my daughter had been in the kitchen making her and her sister a hot chocolate. I opened the dishwasher and it was empty. The little sweetie had done that as well and I’d only been out for 20 minutes.
The utility room
Later in the day after work, I had a random conversation with my husband about where we should store paint. We bought a couple of new pots a while back so that we could touch up some areas downstairs and never did it. The paint was left in the hallway when I cleared the shoe cupboard, and then got shoved back in the cupboard when I cleared the hallway last week (tut tut!).
My husband thought that the paint would be better stored in the utility room rather than the garage. Any paint we put in the garage ends up being unusable due to the changeable temperature in there.
So, that got me checking out the shelves in the utility room to see what was in there. I couldn’t believe that two of the shelves were taken up by all of this stuff…
Utility room cupboard before decluttering
When I sorted through it, I put some of it back into a tidy basket and the rest didn’t even belong in there (such as the candles stick holders that we hardly use but still want to keep). This allowed the pots of paint to fit nicely on the top shelf along with the shoe polish box. And there’s still a bit of room. I still need to work out where to put the candlestick holders. Maybe they can go on a shelf in the garage.
Utility room cupboard after decluttering
This has made me want to start on the rest of the utility room; however, I need a plan first, as it’s a bit of a free-for-all in there at the moment.
Do you have a utility room? If so, what do you store in there, and is it all organised with everything in its place?
As part of the mass kitchen reorganisation this week, I was left with nowhere to put the lap trays and serving trays. They used to lie flat one on top of the other and it was difficult to get our own tray out (it was never the one on top). It was an inefficient use of one of our largest drawers. When my daughter identified the other day that it was better for plates and bowls, the trays got taken out and put on the side.
We couldn’t think where they would fit until I opened one of our small ‘no purpose’ cupboards this evening and had the idea to store them all vertically instead. And they actually fitted! It’s a much better use of the bottom shelf of the cupboard. It was only used for unnecessary random stuff anyway.
Unfortunately the random stuff that was on the bottom shelf has now been dumped in the utility room (a room that I clear parts of, only to fill it again). Sometimes it does feel I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul, ha ha.
I was mentally tired this evening when I sat down to type this up. It was a long day; I literally got out of bed five minutes before I had to log onto work this morning and then worked non-stop until after six pm, with only a short break to make lunch and hang some washing out.
Then it was straight onto chores this evening: washing, emptying bins for bin day tomorrow, watering plants, and making dinner (the list actually felt longer than that).
The TV and chattering in the lounge this evening was going straight through my head so I asked if we could sit in silence for five minutes. That was twenty minutes ago and it’s still so peaceful; it was also enough time for me to perfect this post and press submit.
I have no idea why everyone was raring to go yesterday and today they have all fled the scenes. My husband actually said this morning that there was nothing for me to do in the kitchen so I didn’t have to worry about anything today and could rest. I walked in there and in my eyes all I could see was clutter on the dining room table and some surfaces (it’s all the stuff that came from drawers and cupboards yesterday that now hasn’t got a place).
The only place that I could comfortably rest was in the garden or the conservatory. So, I first sat in the garden eating my breakfast (and can you believe that it started to rain whilst I was out there). I then moved to the conservatory to start writing this post and do some other online stuff. It was very peaceful and I could hear the light rain tapping on the roof, the birds tweeting, and the feint sound of the TV that my husband was watching in the lounge.
Attempting to Clear Up
Later, I braved it back into the kitchen by myself and gave myself more work to do by accidentally smashing the glass lid of my lovely cake stand that was in my way on the breakfast bar. This was upsetting as it was a present from my husband a couple of years ago and I’ve been so careful with it up to now. I also smashed one of our best wine glasses yesterday so hopefully there won’t be a third thing!
I smashed the glass lid of my cake stand 😞
In an attempt to do something good, I opened the large pantry type cupboard that’s in the corner of the kitchen and noticed that my daughter had nicely lined up all of the cereal boxes on one of the five shelves (thank you). The breadmaker had been taken out yesterday so there was a lot more room in there to see what cereals we actually have (too many by the looks of things). I decided to sort out the bottom shelf to see if I could remove items that we don’t want and put away some of the things lying around the kitchen and dining room. This is how the two shelves are looking now:
A couple of organised shelves
Birthday zoom video call
I then had to clear the dining room table to get ready for a zoom call with all of my family for my dad’s birthday (16 of us in 5 different locations). In amongst all of that I made an early dinner and baked a victoria sandwich cake and put some birthday banners up. On the zoom call we lit the candles and sang to him (and then we ate the cake 😊). I know that my mum and dad always read my blogs so…
“Happy birthday Dad 🎂 😘. Sorry that we couldn’t be there in person with you both today”
A couple of weeks into lockdown my daughter somehow came to the conclusion that she needed to help more and around the house, so that I didn’t have to ‘do it all’ (I actually never said a word I promise). So, she now does the dishwasher every morning as part of her routine and has asked where else she can help.
She’s also noticed recently that I’ve been cleaning and decluttering some of the kitchen drawers and mostly likes what I’ve done; however, she asked me this morning whilst she was emptying the dishwasher if she could do something with the drawer that the plates and bowls reside in, as it was annoying her (lifting stuff up and putting it underneath other stuff etc). Now, I could have answered in a number of different ways.
Which option did I choose?
No, leave it, I actually like it how it is
Yes, you have free reign to do whatever you like, see you later
Yes, that would be lovely. Tell me what you are thinking and maybe we can work on it together.
I actually hesitated for a moment before answering. I was in the middle of having my morning tea and toast, having just come back from a lovely walk and I really just wanted to sit there quietly and think. I thought about answer 1 but went for a much kinder answer 3; I wanted to encourage a more open conversation about how we could all organise and use the kitchen more efficiently. After all, she now empties and loads the dishwasher once a day and I usually do it later in the day, so both our opinions count. I want her to be motivated to put things away in their place.
She went on to talk about my newly organised tea cupboard and gave her opinion about how that could be done differently. I was a little bit put out at first, but she made a very good point (I’ll come back to that another day, when we potentially reorganise it). Every point she raised about not just that drawer and cupboard but all the others as well made perfect sense.
It’s funny how we just go about our day putting things where they’ve always gone without a second thought. Almost like robots. Her advice made a lot of sense.
I kept quiet and just listened and then gave some suggestions too. As I’ve always done everything myself, do I didn’t anticipate that one day I would have another opinion to consider, ha ha. Her ways and mine combined could actually give us a much more efficient kitchen space.
And then there were three opinions
My husband entered the kitchen for breakfast. He seemed to want to help and had his own set of opinions of which we both listened to. Some of them we did agreed with and some we didn’t. He had some good points about what we should keep out on the counter tops, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to leave everything out. He said that if we put them away we might as well get rid of them otherwise we’d fall into the trap of ‘out of sight out of mind’. He was talking about the larger items such as the deep fat fryer, kitchen aid, food processer, slow cooker, bread maker and so on. It all started to feel like a bigger job than just sorting out the drawers, and I wasn’t able to keep track of what was being moved here and there!
Now, going back to the beginning of my post, you may remember that I was sitting quietly eating my breakfast reflecting on my life, having just been out for a walk. It was now early afternoon, and all of this was still going on. I started to feel a bit overwhelmed and knew that it was time for a break.
We hadn’t quite agreed on some of the items left out on the sides and it was starting to feel like we’d taken on too much; everyone was talking at once. My other daughter had been called downstairs for her opinion too, but thankfully she was just nodding in agreement with whoever was talking, bless her. She’s very tactful. We had missed lunch and I was eager to get out and sit in the sunshine.
As this post has gone on for long enough (I don’t like to make them too long), I want to end with where we got to after about five hours (see selection of photos below) and how we probably could have tackled things differently.
How we could have tackled things differently
The four of us are all quite visual in how we explain things and learn, so maybe we should have gone with a quick discussion, quick list all of the items and then drawn out on a whiteboard or piece of paper how things could fit into each drawer. Taking everything out was very exciting at first (as you can clean at the same time, and sweeping out old crumbs is very satisfying); however, when you are left with clutter on the sides, then that stops being a place that I want to be in. Not when we haven’t got the time or energy to finish it. It sort of puts me back a few steps and I’m left with a mess at the end of the day in a high traffic area.
So, as the sun had gone in by then, I retreated to my clear and quiet conservatory for a few hours. The girls went to their rooms, and my husband fell asleep on the settee.
Dinner time was interesting. It’s going to take a while to remember where everything is.
Lockdown Cleaning
Today was classic example of true lockdown cleaning and organising in action but without much planning and too many opinions. My daughter had suggested planning tomorrow a bit better so that we know what we need to finish. I think that’s a very good idea.
This might sound a bit over the top, but since lockdown I’ve been getting my girls to put their initial and a date on their bottled water so that when a bottle gets left around the house we know whose it is and when they started drinking it.
When I saw them drinking out of these bottles at dinner time, it gave me the idea for today’s blog.
All I can say is that since they’ve been making their cute little labels, there are no half-full bottles lying around the house or in the bins. I used to get so annoyed about that.
The girls also have a great routine of replacing the bottle in the fridge when they take one out and don’t open another one until they’ve finished the one with their initial on it.
This process has resulted in less bottles around the house and a lot less waste.
This may all sound like quite a simple process and one that probably doesn’t happen in most houses, particularly if you drink tap water like me. My girls refuse to drink tap water as they don’t like the taste, but I can’t complain as at least it’s water and not fizzy or other sugary drinks. Another thought is to get a water filter but I haven’t looked into that yet.
Overall there is less plastic around the house, meaning less clutter. The girls have even started to put the bottles straight into the recycling bin outside.
Some drawers are more prone to getting random crumbs falling in them than others. The drawer that sits below our raised chopping area in the kitchen is the perfect candidate for this.
As I opened the drawer this evening, it occurred to me that it’s also underutilised, as it has many sections and I don’t use them all properly.
Although I had a really busy/productive day at work as well as a full evening cooking dinner and apple pie for dessert, I still had some energy left for one piece of decluttering. This drawer is what I chose for today.
Drawer before decluttering
I took everything out, wiped it around and only put back what we actually use. Just like when I sorted our other drawers a few weeks ago, there were so many random items in there that when I placed everything back, I was left with a couple of empty sections.
I looked around the kitchen to see what tends to get left out on the sides and decided to use the spare sections for pens, scissors, food bag clips and a tap measure. Let’s see if this works and we manage to return these items back to their place after we’ve used them. This is the final result.
Drawer after decluttering
It feels lovely when opening it now (sorry, I do get excited about the simplest of things).
One third of the year gone and I’m feeling quite good about my decluttering journey. I have some thoughts for my additional monthly summary post which I will share tomorrow.
After a quick ‘me time’ walk this morning before the rain came. I then made myself a cup of tea and had a quiet ‘me time’ breakfast.
I don’t know about you, but I only tend to use certain cups in our tea cupboard. The others are used by everyone else or guests. I’ve noticed recently that it’s getting a bit difficult to fit all the cups in the cupboard. I’m also not comfortable putting the clean cups in there with the rim facing down as I felt that it needed a good clean.
I have a lot of different teas in the cupboard which I haven’t sorted through for a while. I wasn’t sure what was lurking at the back.
The decluttering part
So, as part of my daily decluttering challenge, I decided to give the cupboard a bit of love and attention. Here’s the ‘before’ photo.
Tea cupboard before decluttering
The cleaning
I first took everything out and gave each shelf a very satisfying wipe. The shelf with the sugar on it felt very crunchy as I wiped!
The cups
Before putting everything back, I decided that four cups could go into the charity bag, as they were small ones that came with Easter eggs many years ago. The girls use bigger mugs now.
The teas
I then went through the teas. I didn’t expect to find many teas out of date, as I drink so many different types and I’m always refreshing them. I did find a few individually wrapped ‘freebie teas’ which went into the bin as they had no dates on them. I was disappointed about the box of ‘Pukka three mint’ tea which was five months out of date; I didn’t know that it was hidden at the back of the top shelf. I don’t even remember putting it there, but it had a shiny silver bow on the top of it so it must have been a present. Would anyone else drink out of date individually wrapped teas that had been in a box (I’m sure I’ve done it without realising before)?
The finished cupboard
It only took me about half an hour from start to finish.
Tea cupboard after decluttering
I can see all the teas at a glance now and there is ample room for cups and mugs.
Sandra Madeira 