"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

I just might be addicted...

Because I absolutely could not go to bed tonight without first organizing my bottom cabinets.

The left side wasn't that bad since I'd recently rearranged things to fit a small basket for recyclables:



But the right side was giving me nightmares:



Reading up on organizing techniques this week, one thing stuck in my mind--set limits and stick to them. This cabinet was full to the brim because I had way more plastic stuff than I need.

So, I decided to sort my plastic into two main categories: storage (large pieces) and leftovers/lunch. The small ones had to fit into a basket with their lids. The large ones had to stack. After a bit of puzzling, I wound up with this:



I don't know if the Ikea drainer looks silly or not, but to me it was an 'aha!' moment. The lids are accessible, long containers have a place, and I just have to pull the whole thing out to access rarely used items in the back. Same thing for the stack of storage containers, it moves as one. I can pull the basket of smaller containers out from the top without upsetting anything else. I'd call that progress.

Here's the left side now, with tins replacing the formerly useless dish drainer:



Finally, these items were fired for having poorly fitting lids, no lids, no containers or just being generally a useless nuisance. I'll add the usable pieces to my box for the comptoir familial.

2 comments:

Laura said...

Yes, yes, yes! That is fantastic!! Now that you have boundaries and if you are disciplined in following them you should have no problem keeping it that way. Way to go!!!

Rae said...

Thank you!

You can see my 'entrance closet' and my pantry reorganization projects on my blog (just click on the 'organizing/purging' label), which were also inspired by you!

This weekend, I'm working on my computer armoire and my laundry area, LOL!