I haven’t been doing so well with my C.O.P. (cleaning, organizing, purging) efforts these last few weeks. My goal was to tackle at least one small organizing/purging project a week, while trying to maintain a clean house. Well, I’ve done fairly well with the cleaning part, but the rest has been forgotten.
So I’m putting it out here on the blog and sharing what I need to tackle next in hopes that this will hold me accountable to getting it done. And while I’m at it, why don’t you join me, too?
I know some of you are probably really tidy and organized and don’t need to do any C.O.P. project around your home. I envy you. ? But I know for others of you, getting and being organized doesn’t come naturally to you (just like it doesn’t to me), and you need someone to push you a bit. So I’m pushing. If you want to join, pick a project (a room, a closet, a cabinet, maybe your garage), and lets do this together!
The project I need to tackle is my kitchen cabinets. While some of my cabinets are perfectly organized, and my drawers are nice and tidy, and my refrigerator is staying clean and organized, I have so many cabinets that are just a complete mess. And while this is super embarrassing, I’m going to share these pictures with you anyway because this is reality. I see so many beautifully organized homes on Instagram each day and start to convince myself that I’m the only disorganized person out here. Everyone else has it all together. But that’s obviously not true, so I’m going to pull back the veil.
First, let’s start with some pretty pictures. From looking at the outside, one might presume that my cabinets are fairly organized inside, except with those middle cabinets, you can kind of get a peek at the disorganization lurking inside.
Yeah, that’s definitely not a pretty look with those center cabinets.
Well, now let me show you what those cabinet doors are hiding inside these cabinets. The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m missing lots of shelves. So in these two cabinets, which mostly hold my coffee, tea, sweeteners, etc., everything is relegated to the bottom shelf only. None of that vertical space is being used at all.
Almost all of my cabinets are missing shelves. That’s because when I took the shelves out to paint my cabinets (I’m still not really sure why I took them out, but I did), they got misplaced. I’ve had a lot of people through my house working on projects since these cabinets were painted — people helping to clean out rooms before remodels started, people to pick up and haul away construction debris, etc. And I’m thinking that my shelves got shifted around, and then somehow wound up in a construction debris pile, and then got hauled away. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for my disappearing shelves that makes sense to me.
Anyway, let’s move on to these see-through doors. They don’t do a very good job at hiding the massive supply of various supplements.
Matt has a bit of a vitamin and supplement habit. ? He’s always buying new supplements and vitamins that he hears about, so they tend to stack up, and they’ve all landed in these cabinets. I’m sure I could wrangle these better, and maybe move them somewhere else.
The next cabinet over has a random assortment of things, from coffee cups, a soup tureen, Cooper’s probiotics and ear drops, our Keto Mojo and boxes of extra testing strips, and other random items. None of this makes sense.
And these next two cabinets are probably the worst. I rarely even open these two cabinets, and I haven’t assigned any purpose to them at all, so they’ve fallen victim to my “open and shove” storage method. And again, there are no upper shelves.
This lower cabinet on the left is where I used to store my plastic food storage containers, but they were so old, brittle, and stained that I got rid of them about two weeks ago. So now that cabinet (which actually has a shelf!) is empty. The cabinet on the right is another one that is largely unused and purposeless, so it’s an “open and shove” cabinet as well.
This large left center cabinet kind of has a purpose. It’s where most of the canned food goes, but we don’t really eat canned food, so there’s not a whole lot of turnaround in this cabinet. And then it also houses some random drink tumblers.
The right center cabinet is a sad story. See those wire shelves on the bottom? See how that one shelf is flipped upside down on the other?
That’s because it used to be on the top shelf, so I had four shelves in here. This is where I keep all of our everyday dishes. One day when I was getting a plate off of the stack of plates on the upper wire shelf, I evidently didn’t lift the plate enough. Instead, I kind of dragged it off the stack of plates. That caused the wire shelf to shift and come tumbling down, along with most of my dinner plates, bowls, pasta bowls, serving bowls, etc. Most of them broke into a thousand little pieces on the floor, but a small minority made it through unscathed, or only with minor chips.
So until I fix this cabinet with more secure shelving, the clean dishes (the few that i have left) just live in the dishwasher. So not only do I need to fix this cabinet so that it has more secure shelves, but I also need to purchase almost all new everyday dishes.
These last two cabinets on this wall aren’t horrible. At least they have a purpose. This is where I store the small appliances that I use fairly regularly — food processor, ice cream maker, waffle irons, hand mixer, etc. But they could be organized a bit better, I think. At least these have shelves!
So that’s all for that wall. Now here’s the cabinet under the sink. I know what’s under here, but I have to dig to find what I need. I just need some shelves or drawers or some way to keep these items organized.
And finally, there’s this little cabinet. This has more supplements and protein drink mixes. It’s hard to work with such a skinny cabinet, but it could be organized better.
So that’s the tour of my shameful kitchen cabinets. I need these to be organized ASAP. I’ve put this off literally for years, and this is something that definitely affects my daily life. Living with such disorganized cabinets affects the efficiency with which I can do things in my kitchen, and that affects my life day after day.
So this is what I’m working on. I’ll give myself two weeks and show y’all my progress on March 15. Do you want to join me? Do you want to use these next two weeks to challenge yourself to tackle a cleaning/organizing/purging project that you’ve been putting off? If you do, let me know what you’ll be working on! We’ll do this together.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!
