Organize All The Things (#1)

Is there such a thing as reverse nesting? Or maybe just severely delayed nesting? Because I’m doing it — except instead of Emma’s impending birth serving as the motivator, it’s my return to work. I have less than three weeks of maternity leave left, and every day I get more and more annoyed by the state of our house. Although it’s been totally acceptable to me for 3+ years, after spending so much time at home with Emma, it now suddenly seems like a disorganized, cluttery disaster. Basically, I feel like this:

(From the awesome Hyperbole and a Half)

(In addition to wanting to fix up the entire house, I also want to sew “all the things.” Because right now, Emma’s in a sweet spot with semi-predictable daytime naps, which means I do have some time to myself. And I’m kinda scared that once I’m back at work that free time will evaporate to, oh, ZERO.)

The big problem is storage. Our house is rather severly lacking in closet space, a fact that escaped my notice when we were having it built. By choosing to add the upstairs bonus room to the floor plan, we traded a rather large closet for stairs. So while we have a very large master closet and normal sized closets in each bedroom, there’s only one small linen closet in the hallway.

There’s the garage, but it’s not climate controlled. And there’s the attic, but because of the varying ceiling heights of the rooms in our house, much of the attic space is not easily reached. The part that is accessible is occupied by water heaters and HVAC equipment — plus, again, it’s not climate controlled.

Anyway. I started with the kitchen cabinets:

Behold my freshly organized baking and pot/pan cabinets!

Our kitchen cabinets are kind of awkward. They are fairly deep, but the doors aren’t that wide. Then there’s the half shelf that is partly helpful and partly a hindrance. You can put things on the shelf, obviously. But it’s less than a foot above the bottom of the cabinet which limits what you can slide underneath it, and it’s less than a foot from the front of the cabinet which limits what you can put in front of it. For instance, it’s essentially impossible to store a cookie sheet in here unless it’s 1) a small cookie sheet or 2) you store it flat, which takes up a lot of space.

Ideally, we would hire someone to pimp out the insides of all our cabinets with roll-out drawers, custom racks…the whole nine yards. But that costs some serious cash and seems like overkill for what are cheap builder’s grade cabinets in the first place. So I decided to store my cookie sheets in the warming drawer of our oven, since we never use that part, and with the help of some racks and dividers, I was able to bring order to all of the lower cabinets in our kitchen. They were jam-packed before, but now that things are better organized, there’s even a bit of room to spare in a couple places, which is a nice bonus.

Up next: I tackle the pantry! I know you’re on the edge of your seat.