Spring Cleaning (Kinda)

Some people get the urge to do an intense house cleaning each spring.  I am not one of those people.

If there's a room that is particularly bad off (I'm currently thinking of our bedroom which has become the holding area for kid artwork, quilting projects that are works in progress, an exercise machine that rarely gets used, music equipment that is too fragile to be near children for more than five minutes at a time and toys that have been confiscated due to misuse and/or excessive noise [this is in addition to the regular bedroom items like, oh, a bed, chest of drawers and desk]), I spend several good hours doing a complete overhaul and cleaning.  But that could come at any time of the year, not just in the spring time.  The master bedroom is due for its big cleaning any day now; the fact that it happens to be spring is just a coincidence.

But, like any good procrastinator, I decided to tackle something else first, because what better way to think about how to organize your bedroom than to organize your pantry first?  (This reminds me of the numerous times that I re-organized my dorm room closet to avoid writing some awfully boring paper.)

When my mother-in-law told us that the not-so-nice Tupperware people were going to strip her of her consultant title due to low sales, we put in a huge order.  And by huge, I mean huge.  She generously charged us for only half of it, calling the other half my belated birthday present.  And our pantry went from this:





(Notice the large number of giant plastic bags holding things like powdered sugar, brown sugar and marshmallows.  So classy.)

To this:





(Yes, I used a label maker to label the canisters.  And yes, I am totally type A.)

We are loving it!  Now we're trying to figure out which appliances can be donated to the annual church garage sale so we can free up some more pantry space.  The coffee maker that gets used once a year when the out of town in-laws visit?  The fry-cooker that never gets used because we don't eat fried foods anymore?  The juicer that was a wedding gift that we've used a grand total of two times in ten years?  And then there are the mixer accessories we got as wedding gifts.  Seems kinda dumb to keep storing them when we don't even have a mixer, doesn't it?

Maybe once the pantry is completely organized to our liking, we'll get started on our bedroom.  But then, I'll probably find some other project to latch onto just so I can keep avoiding the bedroom.

Ahh, procrastination.....gotta love it.