A Place for the Teapots!

I took a bit of an organizing break over the weekend--I had a good friend visit on Friday night, and then we went to a party on Saturday and a marathon play on Sunday afternoon--but last night I spent about 45 minutes organizing one of my cupboards...and cleaning it.

My evening of tearing through the kitchen, discarding as much as I could in one fell swoop, resulted in a few empty spaces in my cupboards. (Especially when I got rid of all those silly vases!!) Last night I reorganized my main dish cabinet, and actually washed the darn shelves!! I am embarassed to admit that we've been living in our house for nearly 10 years now and we have never wiped down the shelves (to my knowledge). It continues to be a challenge to keep myself focused on organizing and stop myself from fantasizing about what color I would like to paint the cupboards and the walls!!

At any rate, some organization and a few more discarding resulted in a cabinet that looked like this:

Look at all that empty space!! Most of the stuff is on the bottom shelf, because I am very short (5 feet), and the cabinet goes all the way to the ceiling!! I need a chair to get to anything in the back of the middle shelf or on the top shelf.

I was trying to think of what to put in my free space, when I had a bright idea: how about our teapots, which we are always trying to cram into other spaces? We typically keep our coffee maker downstairs because we use it only when we have guests...but I found a home for it on the top shelf...and moved the teapots and french press to the middle shelf. And I still have space! From the perspective of someone who grew up with crammed refrigerators, freezers, and cabinets in my family of origin, and who has continued with that tradition in my own family, I am loving the idea of empty space!! :)

Tonight, I tackle the tea/coffee/cereal/snack cabinet, probably the most crammed one in the house! (And where we typically try to fit the teapots into.) I still have quite a few vases in the kitchen, as you can see...might move those downstairs to the basement.

It would also be nice to move the cold cereal to a lower cabinet so the kids could help themselves. Our oldest son, Chris, is a cereal FANATIC!! He must go through four or five bowls a day.

And Jennifer, over at The Year of Living Obsessively, has inspired me with her clean junk drawer. Must tackle that junk drawer...I've been putting that off!! And I have only six days left of kitchen organizing...or my husband will be very disappointed in me! Such a slave driver he is...