Zone 2 – Kitchen

This Zone was more successful than Zone One. I was more eager to get started and we had a bit of a catalyst to start a day early.

On Saturday we bought some new baking trays as a lot of ours were old and scratched and Sainsbury’s had a special offer on homeware. When we were looking at places to store them, I ended up pulling everything out of the cupboard under the oven.

I did record some of it but because I started a day early, I wasn’t quite prepared! I did take a before picture, but I didn’t check it and it’s so blurry. 

We also had a massive clear-out and declutter of a lot of the things that we don’t use or have duplicates of (6 loaf tins) apart from one occasion making some stuffing in one of the silicon one.

I haven’t taken a new photo but almost two weeks after we reorganised that cupboard it’s still looking the same. 

Every time I did a bit in the kitchen, I seemed to work on three cupboards at once. As I was dealing with the items in that cupboard, I found a handheld blender and I know we own 2 of them and I knew there were other parts in another cupboard.

One of the rules is not to pull out more than you can deal with, this might have been a step over the line. Although I hadn’t set a timer as all I was doing was getting rid of the old trays and putting the new ones in their place.

I only spent an hour on it and I had three cupboards organised about 5 bags of rubbish and a pile of things to send to the charity shop. Sadly, these are still sat on the worktop but we did get my dad to take all the rubbish to the tip so that was a massive win.

In the double cupboard or as I call it Tupperware corner, I decluttered and resorted it so we have kept some sentimental items, some cute bowls that I’ll probably never use and managed to find a space for the nice Christmas dinner service. There is also space left and I have some ideas what I want to move into that cupboard. 

Feeling motivated I managed to tackle quite a few cupboards but I have left the more daunting ones. Manana, manana. One of the things I found was I felt like I wanted to do things and a little bit of accidental tidying and decluttering happened. One night I was looking for some stock cubes and I ended up pulling everything out, purging out of date items, sorting and putting back and moving things to other cupboards and sorting them out as well.

It has been a three cupboard at a time but hopefully, it will mean like items are together. I also changed the use of one of the cupboards from an overspill tea and coffee cupboard to hold cereal and snacks.

I’ve been using the control journal a lot, I’ve learnt that I need every part of the kitchen labelled so rather than putting a set of drawers I need to list all of them individually. Especially while I’m in the declutter phase. As you can see from the photos of my kitchen page I wrote on additional items on the paper under the plastic page divider. I also know I said I wasn’t buying dry wipe markers but they are working out really well.