A Clean Kitchen

OKay, yesterday’s project was cleaning the kitchen. I spent pretty much an entire work day’s worth of time cleaning and rearranging everything in the kitchen.

It is amazing all the stuff you acquire over time. That you cram into the empty corners that you don’t have. And how the way you arrange things doesn’t change over time, even though your patterns and practices do.

We have a dishwasher. Never worked well. Started to leak. Got repaired and still leaked over the floor. So we haven’t used it in years. Wasted space in the kitchen. Can’t remember who I was listening to that mentioned they never ran their dishwasher, so they stored something in there. And I said: BINGO! That was the start of solving our kitchen space situation.

We have a lot of plastic storageware. It was kept in a under-the-counter cupboard, and items always fell out the door and had to be washed whether they were used or not. Well, the top rack is an excellent place to put all the lids, and all the containers stacked well on the lower rack.

That let me move all the trays and cutting  boards, that were stored horizontally in the bottom shelf of the pantry, into the former plasticware cupboard but vertically.

Then I did a major cull of our cooking pots. We basically had two or three full sets, and I culled a whole set out, leaving us with all the induction cookware that goes with our induction cookers left. I moved those pots out of the pantry and into the now available space in the drawer under the oven.

Then  I juggled everything in the pantry, cleared all the utensil drawers, moved all the baking supplies into the pantry, and started shuffling all teh other drawers around. A lot of things down low got moved up, and fewer things got moved down.

There always comes a time in a project like this when you are near the end, you know you are near the end, but it feels like you are never going to get there. I reached that stage when it got to cleaning up all the items that were stacked/stored on the top of the cupboards. All the dust and grease gathers on the items up there. It is also the place where the “pretties” are placed, and everthing you don’t know what to do with, but expect to use, goes.

Well, It was amazing how much of it I could decide to get rid of, and rearranged the rest to cover the same amount of space. No one will look there, but if they do, hopefully it looks pretty, neat, and natural.

Then it was putting everything away that was still left on the counters, and cleaning the counters. At this stage you feel like you are already back to the stuff things in available corners phase that led to the need to clean, but you do it anyway.  And I got all the counters cleared, really cleared.

Of course, I couldn’t have gotten it done without a lot of help, mostly from the boy. He kept cleaning/rinsing items that were being moved around so they could be put back in their new locations. He never complained when asked, and he actually finished after I did. Because after I was satisfied with the cleanliness of the counter, he had to scrub it even better, and finish washing dishes that were available from the day.

So now we will see if the kitchen is more usable, more livable, and more easy to keep clean than it was.