This Will Be Boring To You

But it's so exciting to me!!

This weekend, Steve started cleaning out the kitchen cupboards.  That's right.  Steve.

This might have been my biggest challenge to continue the kitchen transformation.  Such a daunting task.  Especially since we haven't gone through them since moving in 8 years (and 3 kids in the last 5 of those years) ago.  Then add major basement renovation dust & dirt still sitting on every square inch of shelving. 

But without any warning, he did it.  He promised to start out small.  But when I got back from grocery shopping, he was still going.  Love that man. 

I don't have a before shot, but here's an after:

I can breathe!

For a before, picture twice the amount of dishes, bowls, cups, mugs, appliances, vases and kid plastic.  Instead I get to open the doors and see this.

Order on the shelves

I'm telling you, it was the best feeling this morning.  Waking up to make a coffee and seeing this.

This little shelf had the highest traffic in the kitchen.  Before, it was chalk full of medicine, kid toothbrushes, toothpaste, tempra, band-aids, coffee cartridges, sugar, nail clippers...not to mention bags and boxes of random things.  Anything and everything landed here.

Now everything has it's place.  We moved the mugs to be with the coffee (duh!) and threw out all the expired half-full boxes and bottles of medicine.  Phew!  My worst shelf is now my favorite.

Steve's favorite?  This one.

The cookbooks have a home

It looks better in person.  Well, ok, it doesn't.  It's not pretty.  But now it works.  We collected the sorry stack of amazing cookbooks and finally found a place for them. 

Eventually, I want to put an over the range microwave here.  But since that's way down the road, we're enjoying the new home for Steve's well-used prized possessions. 

Sadly, I can't show after pictures of the whole kitchen.  We ran out of time...and our will to live.  This project was indeed a vampire.  It sucked the energy right out of us.  Now I know why it took 8 years, 3 kids and a lovely layer of dust to git 'r done.

So we have two upper cabinets to go.  At least now I get to show a before picture:

CHAOS

Oh - that's bad.  But by showing it's ugly face here, I'll take care of it right away.  Promise.