Week 1 of 52 Weeks of Organizing Your Home

I think most of my blogs will start like this...

So this is something I found on Pinterest (the best site ever!) and am really excited to be doing.  I even got my friend Ferris to do it as well!  My biggest pet peeve about my little house is that there is no room and that it gets sooo cluttered.  I blame it on my 3 kids (Emma, Caden and their daddy!) I never make any clutter of course! Home Storage Solutions 101 is where I found this cool challenge.  Every week there is 1 new thing or area of the house to declutter, clean and reorganize.  This weeks challenge is your kitchen countertops.  I have a little galley kitchen and really don't have to much counter top space, so every little bit I can gain by keeping them clean will help.  I started this on Sunday Jan 1st with my refrigerator (even though countertops were the weekly thing, but I needed to start somewhere and I thought since the refrigerator was the 1st thing once you walk into my kitchen that would be a great place to start).  For this I am really sad I did not take a before picture because it was a mess!  The freezer section housed a dry erase calender that I think still had August or Sept on it, Emma's school lunch schedule on it, a grocery list and a ton of magnets.  The bottom part was the kids junk, it had a dry erase board covered in different color markers, a leap frog alphabet learning thing that never got played with and the alphabets everywhere.  So I decided to clean it all off, wipe down the frig and reorganize it.  Here is an after pic and I am very happy about it now and to me makes the kitchen look bigger even!  I did put the school lunch schedule on a cork board that i put in one of my kitchen cabinets, and on the other inside cabinet I put the dry erase board plus other of Emma's important school stuff.

Very Happy with my Frig now!

Next I went to the stove and cleaned it off because it was getting pretty grummy.  Finally I am getting to the countertops which was this weeks challenge.  But at least this challenge got me motivated to clean and organize!  This part I did on Monday the 9th ( I know it was actually the start of week 2 but I was super busy each night with making stuff for Emma's Birthday parties).  I keep my spinny tool holder next to my stove because I really don't have enough drawer space to keep them in.  I did give this a wipe down and went through my utensils to get rid of anything that I really don't use anymore.  Then I went to one of the 3 problem areas in my kitchen, the back corner.  That is where alot of junk just gets stored.  I needed to scale back on what I really need left out and what can be put in the snack cabinet.  Here is a before and after pic.


Ok in my defense, the bottom part was 1/2 stuff for Emma's birthday treats and the other 1/2 was stuff that needed to go downstairs, and there is no excuse for the shelf!

WOW Look how nice it looks now! Just have to make sure to keep it this way! No more laziness!

The 2nd problem area is the area by my microwave.  This is a catchall for stuff that needs to go to the basement and stuff that really doesn't have a spot or I'm too lazy to put away.  I'm very happy with it now! The 3rd problem area is the space on the other side of the sink.  Right now it holds my mini Keurig and my toaster plus more junk that gets put there.  We don't use the Keurig or the toaster every day, sometimes we don't even use them once a week, but for some reason I cant just put them in a cabinet (one reason is I don't have much cabinet room).  I decided to put the toaster in the cabinet underneath this little area and left the Keurig out since I really didn't have a place to put that in a cabinet!  Maybe this week when I do week 2 challenge (which is cabinets and drawers) I can make room for the Keurig too!


Again, just stuff that needs to be taken downstairs but looks like crap.

There is no excuse for this area!

Love it looking soo clean! MUST keep it this way!

So this 1st week challenge was good and got me motivated to clean some other parts of my kitchen as well.  I guess the good thing about a small kitchen is there isn't too much to clean!
Looking forward to the next week challenge..... Kitchen Drawers and Cabinets!!