27 Day Clutter Challenge – Day 5

If you’ve been following along with my 27 Day Clutter Challenge on Facebook, today marks day 5.

We’ve started with a really quick closet turf, followed by 3 sessions in the kitchen; two shelves and the dread ‘Tupperware’ cupboard. For me, the 2 shelves expanded to the entire pantry because it was the weekend and the momentum got me going. Besides, you can’t clear just two shelves and leave the rest!

Here is the very satisfying result:

I just want to stand in my pantry and revel in my success! If you’ve been following on Facebook you know that I discovered a disturbing amount of repetition in here. Rice like mad, 7 cans of cream of mushroom soup (I only use it for one recipe), 3 bags of icing sugar in various degrees of empty (I don’t even know what I use this for), a lot of rice noodles, and lots of stale or stale-dated spices and other items.

A secondary upside to the momentum is that I created space that created more space elsewhere resulting in a total of 3 cabinets and the pantry being clean and organized. I would say in total it took me about 4 hours over the course of the past 4 days and that is because I didn’t want to quit once I got going.

One of the temptations when clutter busting is to go out and buy things to help you organize. This is a dangerous path. The key isn’t to organize, it is to turf, ruthlessly if necessary.

I will be purchasing one large Tupperware square container though, for my flour. I have a decent set of these and they are very useful, since they stack. If I purchase one large container, I can then release an entire set of 5 round ceramic canisters that have frustrated me for years. For me, that is a good trade off.

So, in celebration of this weekend’s progress, and because it is Monday, today’s project is another quick and easy one:

Go through the pencil drawer. Take all of the pens and pencils out, toss the ones that are dried up or don’t write, and replace the ones that do. (I’ll be posting the challenge again on Facebook) Dedicate 15 or 20 minutes to this task. If you can do more than one pencil drawer (like the one in the kitchen and the one in your desk) do that.

Mia