Kitchen Troubles

 It's time for week 2 of the 52 Weeks of Organizing!









The mantlepiece in the kitchen I promised last week will have to wait. When we removed the painting tape that protected the wall, it pulled off some pretty large chips of the paint that was on it. Eventually we decided to re-do the wall itself as well. I'm quite content with that.

I managed to reach my other organizing goal for last week though: the Christmas decorations. They're all inside this nice plastic box.

It was a nice afternoon of work to put all decorations away, but it was quite fun. I always love working with Christmas decorations. Can't wait to put up the tree at the end of the year again!

As it would be a very short post if I were to stop here, I decided to show you my gift supplies. I organized them somewhere last month. It was very easy to have everything I needed for the Christmas presents in one place!

I had one drawer left in one of our clothing closets in the bedroom. Before, they were spread out between two closets in the dining room: not handy and I didn't always take the trouble to create something nice.
The two black baskets are from Ikea. The right one holds small boxes and containers for me to use for gifts. The left one holds labels and ribbon. As you may notice, it's still pretty empty: I didn't restock everything yet after Christmas passed.

The box with the blue lid holds the pretty things and sticky ribbon to brighten up the gift paper.

I'm quite glad I took the trouble to place everything in one place. Whenever there's a gift to give, it's so much easier and more fun to make it look pretty. I no longer have to search through all kinds of different boxes and then still be unable to find what I'm looking for!

Hello, World!

My first post - how exciting! When the new year had just started, I decided to start with the 52 Weeks of Organizing challenge by OrgJunkie. It's a year late, but I really liked the idea of the challenge and as such, took it up anyway!

For the first four weeks, I have already filled in a list with projects. As I wanted to start with something simple, I decided to go for one of our bedroom closets and the desk drawer this week.

Both of these were not too badly cluttered, but I was still annoyed by it. I cleaned off the shelves in the closet one by one, sorting and purging the things I no longer needed. As you can see, there were baskets already in the closet, but most of my things ended up outside them. One or two things were over their expiry date. I gladly tossed those. While I was working, I ended up sorting out the medicine basket as well. No more digging up the paracetamol from under a bunch of empty cartons.

Before and after decluttering.

I unfortunately don't have a picture of the desk drawer before I re-organized it. There was more junk in it and everything was just lying around. I bought the two baskets at a shop called Xenos. It's Dutch and it has a large assortment of various things. To keep the baskets from moving everytime I open the drawer, I placed a bit of blu-tack at the corners. Now, when I need something from the drawer, I know where it is!

That's it for the first week. Coming up for next week: a redo of the mantlepiece in the kitchen.