Home Organization 101: Week 1, The Kitchen

Welcome to the new series I promised you all!

There's something about starting a new year that seems to always give me extra motivation to re-organize. It seems logical that if I'm planning to be more healthy, more productive, and more focused on what's important, having a clean and organized living space would help significantly.

Luckily A Bowl Full of Lemons blog challenged readers and bloggers everywhere to follow along with her on what she calls "Home Organization 101" a 14-week series with challenges to re-organize a different space in your home each week. I am excited to follow along and take the challenge and hope you'll join along with me!

ABowlFullofLemons

If you would like to join--it's not too late! She posts a new challenge every Saturday with an example of how she organized her own home. You can find this week's challenge (here). I will be linking up my posts to her blog each week so feel free to visit her page weekly as well to see how other bloggers have organized their space.

This week's challenge is The Kitchen. Duh duh duuuuh!

To complete each challenge we have to empty the space we are organizing...completely. That means: drawers, cabinets, shelves, counters...everything. We even have to empty our fridge at some point! Then, we will categorize items and group them accordingly. Then comes the task of somehow putting everything back in a way that uses the space efficiently and logically.

Frank and I started the first challenge today and it made our apartment A MESS. (If you know me at all you'll know this is NOT easy for me to handle). But, in order to do this well...I'm forcing myself to be okay with leaving some items laying around until I find a good place for them.

Here are some photos of what our kitchen looked like BEFORE. As you'll see I resisted the urge to clear off my counters and de-clutter and clean my dishes....before taking this photo. But to be honest, this is how my kitchen has looked most of the time lately. So...here you go....you've been warned.

Clutter. Old microwave and coffee maker and ugly drawers we keep our tupperware in.

Tupperware containers shoved in the drawers of that ugly green organizer. Does not belong in the kitchen.

Clutter, clutter, clutter.

Too much on the counter top. There's no space at all to work on making dinner.

See? There's the dishes... and the keurig I love, but barely fits in that tiny corner of the counter.

The cabinets in this apartment are pretty awful. It's so difficult to deal with a warped board under the sink. Plus it's just a mess.

Cluttered, but notice all the unused space!

The freezer. Ew.

Fridge has no real storage containers aside from the normal produce bins. Makes it super hard to keep it organized. 

Rough right? I'm so embarrassed, but I am hoping the after photos will make up for it! I will be posting the AFTER photos this weekend along with next week's challenge so stay tuned!

What have you organized lately?