I realize that having not updated in over a month, especially after my pity party last post, makes it seem that I have indeed given up. Rest assured that is not the case. Mostly, I have just been busy trying to tread water. The day to day tasks of laundry, meal prep, and kid activities have taken up most of my time. I have not made a whole lot of forward progress on Project Better Mom, but I haven’t back slid either. At this point, I am counting that as a win.
I recently realized that the order I had listed my projects needed to be updated. While the kitchen is important, now that the counters were cleared, the chaos hidden behind closed cabinets could wait. When we moved into this house, the plan was to have the laundry get washed and folded in the laundry room (novel idea, I know) so that it would only enter the house when it was ready to be put away. Due to the way we were not able to properly unpack when we first moved in, it didn’t happen. The folding table is stacked with boxes of craft items. In order to keep the never ending stream of laundry from taking over our living space, the laundry room area needed to be rescued.
I have found that it is important to be flexible on these things. As you go about your day to day life, you often discover that things you thought were really important might need to take a back seat to other things. It’s cool, adjust and move on.
The laundry room is a trickier task than the kitchen. It involves heavy boxes and high shelves. I could do it by myself, but it will be a lot easier if I have Mike’s help. Guess what we have scheduled for Thanksgiving vacation?
In the mean time, I am again focused on just keeping my head above water at home. This mostly involves trying to stay on top of the laundry.
Last week I had an unexpectedly productive day. We buy lunch snacks like crackers and cookies in big boxes and then I package them into serving sizes myself. While serving the little girls their lunches, I noticed the new boxes of crackers and cookies that needed to be packaged up. I grabbed the sandwich baggies and the cereal containers in which I store the snacks and sat down at the table to get to work. Once I finished packaging, I went to put the containers back into the pantry. Lo’ and behold, there was no room for neither the containers filled with pre-portioned baggies nor the extras needing to be packaged.
I cleared off the offending shelf and reorganized its contents. I discovered several empty Tupperware containers in the back. Now I could actually properly store the 3 kinds of flour Mike brought home last week. After a bit of shifting and transferring I had successfully created a baking section in the pantry. Placing the snacks on the shelf along with peanut butter and tuna created a lunch section. Now I had one neat tidy shelf in an otherwise messy pantry. I just kept going. When I got to the top shelf, I decided that it was time to install shelf paper. The shelves were previously lined with that cushy stuff that prevents sliding. I needed to be able to slide stuff back on the shelf. Fortunately, I had several rolls of adhesive shelf paper in the garage. Before I knew it, the pantry had been reorganized.
I moved on to the cabinet above the pantry. We mostly use this cabinet to store bulk items that don’t get used frequently. I discovered some bulk spice containers that often get forgotten because they were stored at the back of this high shelf. This led to re-purposing the cabinet closest to the stove as a spice cabinet. Now all of my spices, along with cooking oils, and sauces like Worcestershire and soy are conveniently stored right next to the stove. I was able to move the turntable that sat on the counter up into this cabinet as well, giving me another counter surface as well.
So, in the month plus since my last update, I bumped pantry and cabinets down on my master list in favor of laundry room. I then completed reorganizing the pantry anyway. In the end a project got finished and crossed off the list, so WOO HOO!
