Careful what you wish for

Operation Relentless Dustbin continues! My kitchen, surprising nobody, contains some of the scariest drawers and cabinets in the house. I go back and forth between terror ("No, not the tupperware cabinet, no!") and denial ("It's only revolting if I open the doors...").

By way of self-motivation, I asked myself this question: 

If I could pick the worst cabinet in the whole kitchen, only one, and have someone else do it, which one would it be? Answer: The Undersink. I would seriously love not to tackle that cabinet. Like, ever. I wish someone would, though, because it's totally the worst. Every time I open it, I completely gross out. I can't find anything, it's crammed full of the filthy and the useless, and maybe I'm imagining it, but it kinda smells weird, too.

So with my Big Girl Pants firmly on, I decided to give myself the gift of not hating the Undersink cabinet. I dug around until I found my rubber gloves, which helped a lot, and emptied the whole mess out onto the kitchen floor.

And that's when I found out that the smell was not imaginary. Underneath the groaning heap of cleaning clensers, spent sponges and bent brushes, all hell had broken loose:

Yep. My sink had developed a leak, which the particle-board floor of the cabinet could not withstand. I sopped up a smelly, 3" deep puddle from the now-concave cabinet floor. The particle board was about as structurally sound as a brownie, and far less appealing. I did what any stout-hearted and powerful person would do: I sat on the kitchen floor and cried. And then I called the plumber.

And while I waited for him to arrive, there was nothing to do but start de-junking. I filled an entire laundry basket with empty cleaning containers for recycling. And then I wiped and dried the flood dreck from all of the containers I was keeping.  There is something surreal about cleaning the outside of your Windex bottle with Formula 409. Just saying.

But by the time the plumber came, I was done cleaning, and done (mostly) feeling sorry for myself for living in a house plagued by plumbing emergencies. The adorable Vitaly (from Ukraine, whose wife who wants to learn how to knit!) replaced my failed plastic drain with a shiny new metal one. He asked me to explain the different kinds of knitting needles to him, which I was happy to do. I taught him how some knitting is flat, and some knitting is tubular. And then I completely blew his mind by showing him how knitted tubes intersect just like plumbing pipes. We totally understood each other.

Once the sink was fixed, there was nothing for it but to demolish the soaked cabinet bottom. Which I did easily, with the aid of a butter knife. The subfloor underneath the cabinet (also particle board), is of course, swollen from the water damage, but after a couple of days with a fan blowing on it, I decided it was dry enough to move back into. And other than to quit crying, here is the only clever thing I did:

I hung up all the remaining spray bottles on a tension rod. Not an original idea, mind you, but a pretty good one. And having been reunited with my groovy hot pink rubber gloves, I installed a clothespin to appoint them a permanent place of honor.

Am I glad that I had the guts to face my Undersink cabinet fear before the whole kitchen washed away? Of course. Do I wish I'd never looked in there at all? Damn straight. But I think I can safely say the bar is now set for scary cabinets. I doubt I'll find a more disgusting, expensive, enthusiasm-dampening hellscape anywhere else in my house.

O God, I hope not.

Economy Size

You know what's hard about living in a small house?  Stocking Up.  As the child of two Great Depression survivors, I was raised to believe that one should keep things on hand in quantity, whenever possible.  Cough-HOARD-Cough the important stuff, because you never know what's coming.  But space is at such a premium in my house that I've never felt I was doing a very good job in that arena.

Case in point: Bath Tissue. We run out all the time. Not just on a per-bathroom basis; I'm talking whole-house dearth. It's not uncommon to hear one of us yelling to anyone in range "Which bathroom is the roll in?!?" Pathetic. I blame myself, of course. It's not that I have far to go to get to the store. It's not that I'm unaware of the fact that the four of us run through it at a prodigious rate. It's not even that I mind buying it. I just can't seem to think of it when I'm at the store. So by the time the bath tissue situation reaches the red zone, I find myself in the paper aisle of the store, in an unreasonable hurry to get the goods and get back home.

It's in those soul-crushing moments that I have wished, O have I wished, that I had room to store the biggest collection of bath tissue imaginable. But then I remind myself, there is only space for 6 rolls on the bottom shelf of the bathroom linen closet. So that's what I get, promising myself to remember sooner next time. Maybe I can invent a Bath Tissue Gauge that lights up like the one on my car's dashboard when the gas is getting low. An Idiot Light for the bathroom...or something.

But now that I'm deeply imbedded in a personal war on clutter, something incredible has happened. You may recall that I have challenged myself to empty, de-junk and reorganize one drawer, shelf, or basket every day. In the great military tradition of giving wars motivational names, I've dubbed this endeavor "Operation Relentless Dustbin". And it's going surprisingly well.

The other morning, Phillip watched in genuine amazement as I de-barfed one of our 3 (okay, 8) kitchen junk drawers. "Why do we have three melon ballers?", I asked him. "What's a melon baller?" he answered. I'm not really confident he's clear on the concept of melon, but I kept one and jettisoned the others. The drawer was done before the coffee. My spouse was deeply impressed. Not enough to offer to enlist in my fight, you understand, but hey, baby steps.

So pumped by my husband's encouragement was I that the next day, I tackled the bottom shelf of the bathroom linen closet. Where the bath tissue lives, when we have any. And do you know what I found?

A 24-in square cardboard box, hogging up most of the room on the bath tissue shelf. How had I never noticed this before? What could be in there, that is so precious to us that we have never disturbed its slumber, even at the expense of adequate basic supplies?

Stuff, it turned out, that I remembered packing TWO HOUSES AGO. That box was a time capsule of our bathroom, circa 2005.  Yep. And a lot of it was actual trash. I must have packed it at the end of the move, when all perspective had been lost. So all this time, I've been living in Insufficient Bath Tissue Hell, in order to devote space to a box I did not know was there, full of crap I did not need.

It will surprise none of you that I ended up cleaning all of the shelves in the closet that day. Like Sherman on his march to the sea, I left nothing behind but scorched earth. And then guess what I did? Yep. I went to the store and procured the Mother Lode of bath tissue.

How's Operation Relentless Dustbin going for you? Care to enlist?

My Drawers Are Showing

I never make New Years Resolutions. I feel like they are negative in two ways: First, the act of making them implies there is something deeply wrong with the way we've been doing things, and Second, they set us up to fail when we can't manage to change ourselves at some cellular level. No, thank you. I'd rather believe that I'm taking stock of my choices more often than once a year, and then set lofty goals at least that many times, too.

If your dreams don't scare you, they aren't big enough.                                                           - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

But this year, I accidentally made a kind of resolution, in that I issued myself a challenge, which happened on our about January 1.

It all started with The Bins.  The Rockstars (not) who built my kitchen failed to add any cabinets to an entire wall.  Which means that not only is there no work surface over there, there is no place to store any of the crap that goes in a kitchen. Like food. And storage bags. And just, well, kitcheny stuff.  So nine years ago, when we moved in, I hacked a "temporary" solution:

Shelves from Target, a repurposed toy box, and a gazillion wooden bins from the clearance aisle (which were pink and purple when I bought them...gag).  It works marginally well, as long as I don't try to re-label any bins from what they used to be, because it turns out my family can't read chalk.  The main problem is that open shelves and bins are, um, open. And lots of nasty airborne gunk from the kitchen lands in them every day. Long story short: There I was on Boxing Day, T minus 3 hours from the big party, de-gunking the inside of every single bin. You know how parties always end up in the kitchen? I just couldn't risk having a party guest see the bottoms of my bins. Spaz much? Epic.

So big and disgusting and time-consuming was the de-barfifying of The Bins that it got my wheels turning. See, every nook and cranny of my house (and I bet yours, too) has a box, basket, shelf or drawer in it. And every one of those probably requires attention.

Ewww.

But rather than allow myself another hysterical dirt-purge, I decided to issue myself a challenge, instead.

I'm going to see if I can clean out a drawer, basket, shelf, or other nook every single day of 2015. So far, it's really easy - there are so many to choose from! Want to join me? Here are the rules:

1.    Pick a drawer, any drawer. No obsessing about where, when or how; no master-planning or list-making, or project management. Just grab some container and give it hell. Could be a pencil cup or the whole coat closet - match the job to your level of enthusiasm.

2.    Set a timer for 15 minutes. Otherwise you'll (I'll) obsess over every ball of lint you (I) discover. The idea is to work fast and be ruthless. When the timer goes off, set it for 15 more minutes and knit. Repeat alternating between working and playing until the container is purged. So far, I haven't purged anything that took longer than 2 repeats.

3.    Take everything out of the container and dust/dump/vacuum it out. Then make three piles: Throw Away, Give Away, Keep. You know how this works. Just grit your teeth and remind yourself you can do anything for 15 minutes. And when you're done, you get to knit.

4.    Put back everything you're keeping, in some sort of rough order (again, no obsessing). Throw out the actual garbage, and put the giveaways into a box destined for charity, as soon as it is full.

5.    Only one project per day! It feels so great to free myself of stuff that's been dragging me down that I find it really hard not to take on more than I should. But the point is not to spend any more time and energy than is necessary each day, so I'm only doing one at a time.

Here's the drawer I picked today. Middle one in my bathroom. Can't see/find/remember anything in there. It won't open all the way in this photo because there is a logjam at the back. What I learned:

1.    I can declare amnesty for myself and release the following into the void: Bad cosmetic purchases, things other people gave me, and broken things I haven't fixed yet.

2.    I may have a hand lotion problem. No fewer than 17 different products were found in this drawer, many of which I know do not actually work.

3.    Hair accessories are not eternal. It's okay to free myself of the "Bump-It", the sparkly barrettes Lindsay loved when she was three, and the ponytail elastics that have lost their snap.

While there's still a lot here, I can now see the bottom of the drawer, and I have pertinent information about this drawer, going forward; i.e., No, you don't need any more hand lotion.

And here is what I tossed.  Fully 1/3 of the drawer's former contents. Things which were actually keeping it from closing properly on the first try. Stuff that made me sad because it reminded me of mistakes or excesses. Ballast my ship does not need. 

Is it possible that 1/3 of my whole house needs to be jettisoned? Maybe so. I'll let you know. 

Join me! Let's show off our drawers! And of course, tell me how it goes in the comments!