21-day organizing challenge: Week Three Recap

This marks the final post of the 21-day organizing challenge. I hope you have enjoyed the challenge, as have I. Thank you for being patient with me during the 21-day challenge. During this 21-day period, I have been swamped at work, my dad has dealt with a lot of health issues, and we’ve experienced the hospitalization and eventual death of another relative. To say our plates have been full is an understatement.  Rather than my family taking a back seat, I’d much rather my blog take a back seat. Now that things have calmed down, you can be sure we will be back on a regular schedule now.

15-  On day 15, we organized the cabinet under the kitchen sink. We already had these organizing baskets in place, with a separate basket for kitchen cleaning supplies, and one for washing supplies. We now have two separate baskets, one for hand-washing supplies and one for dishwashing supplies. We still have the basket for cleaning supplies, too. 

16-We organized our kitchen cabinets over the summer, and that included the cabinet and drawers where our bakeware lives.  The glass bakeware is housed in a cabinet, which is working well. The drawers are really not working as well as they should be. 

When we get our china cabinet and some of our entertaining ware moves into that china cabinet, we will be organizing a bakeware cabinet that looks similar to this.

[source: http://www.shelterness.com]

17 and 18- Our refrigerator really wasn’t that poorly organized, but it definitely needed some straightening up. As is the case with the rest of our house, like items are housed together. We employed dishwasher-safe plastic bins to better organize fruits and veggies, and to separate the dairy/deli drawer. There are separate drawers for lunch meats, bagged cheeses and sliced cheeses. Our freezer is certainly a conundrum. It is a deep drawer freezer, so there is lots of vertical space, but little else. I chose to get separate bins for poultry, beef, seafood, and pork. I also chose to utilize the vertical storage by using vertical bins. There are different bins for side items, breakfast items, and veggies.

A before shot of my freezer:

And the after: 

19-  We don’t really have a junk “drawer,” but we do have a “junk” bin in our laundry room. Our junk bin is not functional for us because we can’t find anything.  I decided this bin would be better for light bulbs, as they are stored in bulky boxes. The small items in our “miscellaneous” bin were better suited to this longer bin. I simply switched the two containers and it has worked a lot better.

20- Our former medicine cabinet was housed on the top shelf of our drinkware cabinet. This is a small shelf and it was hard to find things when we needed them. We emptied the “junk” cabinet above the stove and re-located the bundt pan and colander to areas that made better sense. This cabinet now contains only medicines. Like items all stored together in one place, well out of the reach of little hands.

21: adapter/cord storage:  We currently store our cords and adapters in a wicker basket in our office. We currently have our basket divided using toilet paper rolls, of all things. This is not the best solution, but at the moment, it is working for us because all the cords are kept in one place. We do have to do a little searching to find the adapter we want, though. Eventually, I’d like to see some sort of cord storage that is divided and labeled.