Behind Closed Doors

I came back from my week away all worked up to get rid of stuff and make the house feel less messy. One of the projects I wanted to take on was getting the bathroom shelves looking clean and being clean. We have a lot of dust in the house from construction and just from the natural dustiness of Alameda, so the open shelves that were fine in other contexts were a maintenance nightmare.

Plus they are these old fiberboard shelves I bought 15 years ago, so I feel like I've gotten full value from them.

That's a solid hour of dusting every week, and that didn't always happen.

So yesterday I took a trip to IKEA and came home with a Billy bookcase and a door for it. I'd love to figure out some way to make it all look nice and clean with orderly shelves, but I'm pretty happy with just having everything closed up nice and neat in one cabinet.

What you can't see in this picture is that there was another shelf unit in the bathroom that we also removed, so the scale fits in the bathroom again. We had been weighing ourselves in the laundry room, which is not nearly as comfortable as it seems like it ought to be.

(Gosh, it would be really great if I finished painting the bathroom, wouldn't it? I started that the week before our wedding so I do have an excuse, but not a good one because we recently celebrated our seventh anniversary.)

The other project for this weekend was reorganizing the pantry. We had a lot of loose packages of stuff and stuff piled everywhere and anywhere on the shelves, so on the same trip to IKEA I got some glass storage jars and then spent a nice afternoon with the label machine and the jars and ended up with this:

We have eight kinds of flour, people. (All-purpose, cake, whole wheat, bread, soy, almond, hazelnut, and semolina, plus gluten which I didn't count.) I didn't even count the many types of sugar, but the list starts with three different shades of brown sugar and gets longer and longer from there.

To get everything to fit nicely, I put a bunch of smaller things like vases and egg cups in boxes and put them on higher shelves, because while I do use them, I don't use them every day. I also moved a bunch of stuff we never used and will not use out to the giveaway pile.

This thing is about getting rid of things I don't just LOVE, and to that end we've made quite a pile in the dining room:

Everything there, minus the table and the cat (would it be a Casa Decrepit photo without some animal creeping in to pose?), plus a couple other boxes of stuff in other parts of the house, is leaving in the next two weeks. (We're having an un-garage-un-sale next weekend, I think.)

I almost can't believe how much of a pile we've made. When I started I half thought the pile would end up being much smaller, but as soon as you start throwing furniture into the mix the volume increases a lot.

posted by ayse on 08/22/10