untanglingknots.com

by Karla ° Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Or, more specifically, my junk cupboards. I can’t seem to get away from all this, er, god, I don’t even know what’s in them anymore. All I know is it started with my kitchen counter tops and then it multiplied and spread inside the cupboards virtually overnight and it’s totally out of control and driving me absolutely batty.

I should probably explain how this mess happened. See, our kitchen is, well, as far as kitchen’s go, pretty rad, in my humble opinion. And coming from me, that’s quite the statement because it’s not exactly like I’m known for my culinary abilities or appreciation for fine food or for cooking pretty much anything other than chicken fingers and cookies. I just really love our kitchen because it is smack dab right in the center of our home, a link between the dining room and the family room, close, but not too close to the laundry room and exactly the perfect distance away from our more formal living room. And by more formal, I mean the sofa isn’t covered in milk and ketchup stains like our robin egg blue hand me down sofa in the family room from my mom, which was a hand me down sofa from her sister probably back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. But why buy a new sofa when your kid still thinks rubbing the ketchup INTO the fabric helps make the mess go away, right?

Back to our kitchen. It has a high ceiling, a perfectly sized eating space in front of white trimmed double French doors lined with floor to ceiling red drapes that match my teapot. And that probably sounds really odd, but my chilli pepper red teapot is like, my most favourite kitchen accent piece. Our kitchen also has a counter height table for four, specifically purchased for its height so Samson in all his massively ginormous doggy joy can’t yoink food off our plates and a really great center island large enough to hold 50 or so of my homemade chocolate chip cookies while they cool (What? You don’t bake 50 cookies all at once? Oh!) It’s a kitchen where company tends to gather, laugh, drink and eat and, most importantly, it has a wicked amount of cupboard space. Cupboard space, that, because the kitchen is the heart of our home has somehow lost its purpose as a place to hold dishes and transformed into a hiding place for papers, pens, bills, envelopes, phone chargers, receipts, sunglasses, duct tape to keep a cranky kid quiet, you know, all the normal stuff people need on any given day.

So, with such a lovely kitchen and all its great cupboard space, what’s the problem right? Well, the issue is that I just can’t stand clutter. I put my toaster away after every use. Our small toaster oven and bread maker have their spot hidden from view in the depths of our cupboards. Even though we make protein shakes daily, the blender gets tucked away after every use. Despite ample square footage of counter space, I just can’t stand anything cluttering it. Even the sunshine yellow dish soap bottle has its place beneath the sink. Some may call it barren but to me, empty counters are kind of, I don’t know, Zen.

So, all this decluttering left me no choice. Stuff had to go...somewhere. It started with one shelf, you know, for appliance manuals, a few papers, a mug filled with pens, that sort of stuff. But then, I don’t know, it’s like our junk started making out with other junk and then spawned junk babies and then spawned more junk offspring because that one junk shelf became two, then three, then an entire cabinet. And then when that cabinet became full of crap even more junk started spilling over onto the counter tops. That’s when I said enough is enough, and bought some cute little baskets, rearranged some cereal boxes and voila, a nice and tidy space for (more?) cables, batteries, birthday cards I can’t bear to throw away, along with a few dead smart phones and the boxes they came in because maybe with all this mysterious multiplying of junk going on they may just spawn me a new iPhone or something. YOU NEVER KNOW! And, AND, because toys strewn everywhere drives me just as batty as cluttered counter tops; I cleared yet another entire cabinet for Nate to keep his toys, puzzles and dinky cars. All the stuff that never seems to make its way back to his playroom.

Suffice it to say, my kitchen cabinets are exploding at the seams with junk and toys. I may barely be able to open a cupboard door without Tupperware toppling over on my head, but dammit those bare counter tops are worth it!

Labels: Soapbox