Tidying Up Tuesday: Cupboards

You may recall from my post on my books that we have three sets of nice cupboards under our bookshelves.

They look nice on the outside, but on the inside...

This cupboard actually wasn't too bad, once I took the photo albums out and got them on the bookshelf.

As always, I took everything out of the cupboards and piled them up in the living room. I also included the three-drawer cart that was 2/3 of the way dealt with on paper day, because it had a lot of things like paper clips and tape that I knew I'd be moving into the cupboards.

I also included this box that lives on top of our fridge that holds batteries and A LOT of random crap.

 I wanted to get office supplies into this cupboard, because I can never find tape or batteries or paper clips when I want them. Pulling the heavy box down from on top of the fridge is also a pain. So after another trip to the dollar store, I had some handy bins for my office supplies.

This cupboard has tape, batteries, the stapler, envelopes, and light bulbs. I had five rolls of scotch tape because I could never remember if I had any in the random box, so I kept buying more. Now it's easy to see what I have!

The other two cupboards mostly held our games. I love board games, but no one else in our family does except Amelia. So I was really honest with myself about what games we would actually play in the future, and got rid of the rest. I even got rid of some of the Clue games in my collection (but not all of them, I'm not a monster).

Kids' games. The green bin is for games without a box, like Slamwich, and decks of cards.

"Grown-up" games. Stacking the games on their sides instead of on top of each other is AWESOME. So much easier to get out what you want without messing everything up.

This was a smaller project, as they go, but one that I felt really helped me get organized and stop resigning myself to clutter. It also directly addressed things that were frustrating me: the random box on top of the fridge, and never knowing when I was running low on office supplies.

My little helper fell asleep while I was cleaning up.

Next time: It's Spring Break next Tuesday, which means the boys will be home all day and can help do their room! It's going to be a nightmare, I will tell you that right now. It'll be an all day project, and at least one of us will cry (probably me).