Day #8 of 30 Days to a Simpler Life---Streamline Your Kitchen

Happy Monday!  Welcome to Day #8!

Take an hour to go through your panty*.  Remove everything you will never never get around to eating---like that candied fruit you received as a gift, that low-sodium soup that tastes awful, and those seasoning envelopes that are five years old.  Then toss items with dates that have expired.  Update your pantry today.

(30 Days to a Simpler Life, p. 50)

*This is an actual typo from the book.  I was amused to be instructed to take an hour to go through my panty and I thought you would be too :-).  

OR for serious simplifiers only...

Imagine that you are going to paint the inside of your cupboards and drawers white.  To get ready for the painter, box up everything in your kitchen.  Do that today.  Haul everything out to the garage.  Then, after the imaginary paint dries, bring back what you need---as you need it.  After six months, recycle everything you didn't use.  (30 Days to Simpler Life, p. 54)

Well, I don't think I'm going to be a serious simplifier today.  The garage is the Cobbler's domain so I'm not touching that one with a 10 foot pole...not to mention, that I really don't have that much stuff that I don't use in my kitchen.  The pantry on the other hand is a whole other story.  I think it will take me maybe even longer than an hour to get through there.

Here are my day #7 results.  One thing that I am pretty good about is keeping stuff off the counter so limiting the amount of stuff on the counter was a really easy task.  Going through the drawers, however, was ack!  Everything was just smashed in there with no organization whatsoever.

I ended up taking everything out of the drawers and then putting it back in.  It may not look that much different, but I put the makeup that I don't regularly wear (because it's the wrong season, etc.) in the black bag.  I put the stuff I wear on a daily basis in the brown bag.  The other thing that helped make it look much better was picking up all the stray hair elastics and putting them around the bottom of my hair product bottle.  Plus, I wiped out the drawers which vastly reduced the "oh my grossness" factor.

Then, I got the drawer with all the spare product and rarely but still needed items organized a little bit better.

Finally, I gave the bathroom the old scrub down and it looked pretty show worthy.  I still need to wash the bath mat though.  Unfortunately (fortunate most days...unfortunate for this challenge), I have two more bathrooms to do.  I'll have to save that for another day.

Now, I told you guys that if I broke the non-perishable sabbatical that I would 'fess up, and I have indeed broken it.  I have blogged in the past about my little sister's wedding coming up in October here and here.  She was in town from out of state this past week to work on wedding stuff and finally she picked a bridesmaid dress. This is for sure the one in navy just like the photo:

I didn't have to pay for it yet so that's not where I broke the sabbatical.  I broke it Saturday morning when I bought the flower girl dress and matching sweater for Red and the same set for my niece (my other sister will reimburse me later).  It was on extreme sale at JCPenney (50% off, plus my mom had a coupon, plus the mother of the groom has a 25% employee discount) so I paid $28 for both the dress and sweater.  It had to be done so I guess that ended my sabbatical.  I'm going to try to continue to be a good kid though and not buy anything else...although Tom Thumb needs new sneakers pretty bad.  Not buying is harder than I thought it would be!  I'll keep the confessions going though if it makes you guys feel better.

See you back tomorrow for the pantry showdown!