I just posted about my kitchen and changes that have happened and will happen (sooner than later, I hope!) With all this comes junk and more junk to be organized.
We already have a house full of junk to de-junk, now have so much more since moving the old cabinets fully out of the kitchen. One row of cabinets was still very good, so we moved that into the laundry room and will install the base and wall portions eventually, but for now they sit one atop of the other and I have good storage for so many things that I never did before. Laundry and cleaning things, bulk this and that from Costco. Not cluttering the kitchen and jamming things here and there. It’s nice.
But there was a large expanse of cabinet that was packed full of stuff we hardly ever use, and it was trashed (the cabinet) and so all that stuff is in need of sorting and it’s only partially been done. There are things that are homeless still, that I want to keep/use, but need to get the kitchen permanently finished before I can do some things.
Re-organizing the stuff in a kitchen is a nightmare, for me at least. The junk drawer that turned into three junk drawers and a few cabinets of junk … augh!
There is just stuff all over the place in every room too, despite the trying to find a home for everything for the most part. Houses with few storage places, not enough furniture, no room for the few bits of furniture we do have … a house so small for an ever growing family … augh!
We finally bit the bullet and purchased a storage lease this past month. So we are weeding out the stuff that we want but can’t use now, the stuff we seem to want but want to live without if the trial of separation work out that we forget and then can donate it away. There is also box after box of stuff we need to sort through, now we can bring it away and do it in the storage unit when we have some time here and there, to sort away from the house, where it’s a task we can complete instead of getting that drug out feeling of “I have other things I could be doing … I’ll just put the lid back on and think of it another day” and never go back. Sometime hubby will bring in boxes and force the sorting, and it makes my head feel so dense and my limbs like rocks. I hate junk drawers, boxes of stuff. But I’m a saver. A lost cause one too.
There are reasons to save stuff. I just need all the right bins and boxes to save what I need to save, and get rid of all the cardboard boxes that are so horrid. Then have the right solutions in the house for usable stuff to be in it’s own place. We lack decent closets. They are so insufficient I cry just thinking about them. Shelves, for books, things, well this kitchen re-do is helping that, and then to get the spaces in the living room filled out with cabinetry will help, each side of the fireplace is recessed and is begging for cabinetry, and the TV is begging to be mounted above the fireplace. These things will be done after the kitchen. We might put a beverage center/bar in the left flanking one, that is near to the kitchen, and a media/book area on the right side for books, media, and the electronics (TV/Audio.)
Right now it’s a hodge podge of furniture we have, dinky media stands, old dressers but not enough for all of us, beds that need replaced, no nice frames at all. Closets are nothing but holes with wire hanging shelves, not outfitted to hold what we need. We have some bookshelves that can’t hold all we have, they are cheap, and we need more books too. Augh.
Things are looking up, we are weeding things out. We actually did throw out our big TV Armoire, it wasn’t that good in quality, kind of falling apart, and just a hulking big thing that held lots of stuff in a nasty manner. I got the idea to put the TV on the French Bakers Rack (one of the few pieces of furniture that I consider worthy of keeping and of nice style/quality). The TV is an LCD flat-screen, 32″ with speakers on both side, making it appear wider. The stand barely fit on the base, table-height of the bakers rack, and the shelves behind it gave just enough clearance for the back of the TV base. It was not safe to leave it like that though. I had an idea, hubby had another, both with bungee-cord thoughts, he went to look for some long ones in the garage, we had one that was shorter and wouldn’t work for either of our ideas. While he was gone I got to thinking and wrapped the bungee-cord around the TV stand base and then hooked each end to the “iron” bars that go up the back of the bakers rack. Voile! Secure. When hubby came back he hadn’t found anything longer, and was able to find one shorter bungee-cord to supplement the configuration I’d tried. It works wonderfully. We have all the equippment on the shelves behind and behind/above, and also have some of my records on one shelf (when I couldn’t put them anywhere before) and we have room to arrange other things nicely, when before it was a big hodge podge of unhappy arrangements and workings.
Hubby pushed the old TV Armoire out the door and it fell and went *splat* in the front yard, literally fell apart completely. The piece of junk. We paid so much for it back in the day, what a shameful thing!
For now my bakers rack will fill this need, and eventually it’ll be unloaded, cleaned-up and put into storage to await a happier house to live in (with us!)
Of course all of this is exasperated with a baby in the house again. All the stuff. I knew last year before the baby was due that we’d be feeling the crush and indeed we are, with every month the crushing gets crushing-er. At least the kitchen is more right now, and we have a storage unit for overflow.
