Superclean

Let's see what I can do with my messy kitchen in one day.

First off, I've taken some pictures with what I'm starting out with. This is what happens when a housekeeper gets depressed! Let this be a warning for all of us! I went through a rather dark period just the past month or so, and this weekend I had to stop and shed a lot of undeserved guilt about things that happened years ago. Now, at the beginning of a new month and a new monthly cycle, I'm full of energy and ready to go!




Ok, I started by putting my dishes away and washing the rest. I washed even what would usually go into the dishwasher, because I want them all clean and there isn't enough to make a load. Actually, I started by putting a load of clothes in the laundry and setting the timer for a half hour. Ok, it's 8:20, here I go!

10:30am I pop in to write that I was 'sidetracked' into taking care of all of my overdue cans. One by one I opened them and dumped them into a container that my son carried to the compost each time it was full. Rinsed them and filled up an entire tub. I'm going to have to drop the recyclables at the dump today. This is still kitchen focus, so that's ok!

11:00am Break for lunch.

12pm My pace is going to be slower, but I bet I can still get something done. I'm crockpotting dinner, so I'd better get that going first. I'm going to get the meat off the turkey carcass that we cooked Friday and make a soup. I do that in the crock pot. So far I've taken care of the old cans and thorough-cleaned between the sink and the stove. The stove itself needs a good scrub.

1pm Finish! I thorough-cleaned between the sink and the refrigerator. The stuff in the sink is all new from lunch, which was pasta. I washed out both recycling bins, discovering in the process that the garden hose does in fact spray water when you aren't holding down the handle. So I had to change clothes... In taking care of all those cans, I opened up an entire kitchen shelf that I can use for other things now.

Ok, I admit I'm done for the day. I'll spend the rest of the day dealing with correspondence, taking my son to Children's Choir, making supper, etc. So here's my progress...





It's still going to take another couple of days to really get the kitchen where it should be. This is a good start, though. The crock pot is kind of hiding much of my progress, but it's been made!

Kitchen Upkeep!

How things change! Since my last update, my husband has landed a job and I have quit mine. I am now a full-time mother and homemaker proper! It didn't take long for me to launch headlong into long-neglected housework and today is no exception.

How often you need to do this really depends on how you run your kitchen. Since I've been quite lackadaisical, this badly needed to be done. I basically took all of my non-refrigerated goods out this morning and put back only what was still good. Come to think of it, everyone probably could stand to do this maybe yearly. Even the best housekeeper may end up with a three-year-old box of brownie mix in the depths of her cupboard.

My house is a bi-level, and the kitchen is pretty small as kitchens go. I don't have a lot of cupboard space. There are two shelved closets in the hallway, and one of them is my pantry. There I keep dry goods, cans, etc. In my kitchen, I keep baking goods (from rice to vinegar to baking soda to cane sugar) and the simplest common things I have more often, like my trusty jar of Ovaltine. Down in the cellar, I have a shelf on which I keep things like extra boxes of cereal that I bought on sale and the cases of ramen that my husband persists in buying periodically for himself. I cleaned up the kitchen this morning, getting everything off the floor for once and giving it a good scrub, so I had plenty of room in which to pull everything out of the cupboards and pantry and go through it all. Wow. I ended up dumping easily half my inventory.

I hate putting so much stuff into the garbage. I live on a four acre lot, and I have designated a small area for compost. You don't even need to have four acres to maintain a compost bin. You can do it on two, even one acre, depending on what you compost. Meat is not recommended as it attracts carnivores. Most dry cereals, pastas, and vegetable leftovers can be composted. I filled a container with old potato flakes, ancient bread crumbs, aged pastas and similar, and my young son carried it out to the compost and emptied it out for me.

Hopefully this will help me keep from buying things that we already have, that I just plain couldn't find!