Ok, people... are you finished with Quest #3 yet?
If not, you still have time. Come on... you KNOW you want to clean your kitchen?????? It's not like it's summer and there are tons of other things you could be doing...
With the help of my ladies (ie my 5 and 4 year old), this took about 2 hours over 2 days.
As usual, be gentle... my house ain't perfect lol. It's old... and needs work... but it's mine (well, mostly it's the banks... but in 22 years it will be mine... HUZZAH!)
Anywho... lets get going...
(BTW, I show these pictures every week not to brag about doing it, but to actually prove that I have lol. How sad would it be if I sent you on these quests and didn't do them myself? I'd be one of those do what I say not what I do people... )
AND, I resized all of these pictures and when I posted this blog, the pictures were the right size... but for some reason, they have gotten bigger again... arg... anyway... I tried)
THIS is the island of my kitchen. The baby was always getting things off of that bottom shelf. It was an eye sore... so that's where this week's quest comes in...
THIS...
is my hutch that I bought from my wonderful, awesome and terrific sister (who now reads this blog... :) )
Now, the sad part of my hutch is that I had actually cleaned it off about 2 months ago and now it looked like this again... I didn't exactly get the "You have to keep it up" Memo...
Ok, so I started with the island. I took everything out...
And found some really REALLY cool things I didn't know I had. I blogged about some of them (like my baby pictures with Mama and Daddy), but I also found my oldest daughter's baby shower scroll.
*I found my student teaching folder (WOW... that brought back some memories... not all of them good).
*I found the calendar that I wrote all of my doctor appointments on when I was pregnant with daughter number 1.
*I found a glass candy dish that I don't remember having...
*I found LOTS of pictures... LOTS of pictures! It was so fun going back through the pictures of when my oldest 2 were just tiny babies.
Like I said, it was American Pickers... kitchen style. I was good and put everything that had been shoved in there in its proper home... and yes, the candy dish is very much being used ;)
In the end... I got this:
I still have to put new paper down because the old has gotten so worn over the years, but still.. vast improvement. The next day, the baby crawled over to it... stopped. Looked. Wrinkled her nose at me (lettng me know she DIDN'T approve), and crawled away. I'd call that a success :)
By the way (yes, I typed that out lol), that stool is my daughters. They are too short to reach the counter and want to help Mama cook. I'm ALL for that!
Besides the baby being in everything, another reason I wanted to do it was that we had food piling out onto the cabinets and I needed more cabinet space to put things.. what better way to get NEW cabinet space than to use EXISTING cabinet space in different ways (see, I didn't invent the wheel here... but I'm finally figuring out how to make the darn thing turn ;) )
I now have a can cabinet, a cereal/box cabinet, and a cabinet for cleaning/ziploc bags. It's all more organized now which is just awesome :)
Here is a picture of the hutch when I got everything out of it...
Yeap, it had been a catch all for EVERYTHING. Bibles, ink pens, crayons, phone boxes, pictures, etc... all shoved in this tiny little thing. (I turn your attention to my reflection in the glass... yes I was REALLY wearing that lol... in fact, I'm wearing it now. Don't judge ;) )
A few hours later we had this...
(A side shot because I had realized that all shots I'd taken prior featured my pink shirt and hubs fishing pjs featured prominently... ) I think it looks 10xs better :)
Here is a full view of my dining room/kitchen from the living room (ignore the diapers in the pictures.. I told you I had kids lol).
So, that's it! That's the end of Quest #3 for me! I feel like I slayed the Kitchen Klutter Dragon and ready for the next. I'll post it tomorrow. Its starting to get confusing for the Quest page if I keep combining them (sorry).
OH... and I wanted to add this...
This is what my kitchen looked like this morning.
Lol, I did a 5 minute clean up right after I took this picture and it was back to the way it was... 5 minute pick ups are awesome!!!!
So, how did everyone do? I hope you slayed your own kitchen klutter monster and had as good of a time doing it as I did. :) Leave a comment and let me know how you are doing. There are 9 quests total this summer, and we can do it (see the Rosie the Rivitor background I have now.. she's encouraging us on!!)
Check back tomorrow for Quest Number 4!
Much Love,
Kelly