Operation {Re}Organization: Kitchen Cabinets Part 1

Whew boy! The past couple of weeks have felt like a whirlwind to me! With the launch of the new onesie line on CSW Designs last week, things have been busier than usual around here. I've also been working on a few very exciting behind-the-scenes things that I can't wait to share with you soon. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen my post last night about August being an exciting month for the blog. Hooray!

One of those exciting things is happening this week. I'm guest posting on Serenity Now! Amanda's on vacation this week (lucky duck) so she asked me to share a project with her readers. It's scheduled to go up on Thursday - I'll be sure to remind you when it's live. :)

OK! Now onto the subject of today's post - organizing our kitchen cabinets. Operation {Re}Organization is soldiering on in our little apartment, and I was so excited to get started on this project this past weekend. I spent a lot of time on the kitchen floor since this project was all about tackling the lower kitchen cabinets. Pretty much every cabinet and drawer in the lower half of our kitchen, including under the kitchen sink (pun intended), needed to be cleaned, consolidated and organized.

Let's take a tour of the cabinets, shall we? Starting on the left side of the kitchen, we have three very shallow and narrow, but very long drawers, along with a deep one on the bottom. Next to that we have my least favorite cabinet of all - the corner cabinet with a giant, two-tiered lazy susan.  These things are just a pain in the you-know-what to organize well.

How 'bout a look inside these disastrous drawers and corner cabinet? Brace yourself...

Ahh! Messy kitchen tool alert...

Followed by this inefficient, space-wasthing drawer that housed ziploc bags and napkins...

Followed by another messy drawer full of serving utensils!

The bottom drawer holds all of our tupperware and is actually working out ok as far as accessibility and organization goes. It's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found so far for storing the mish mash of reusable containers in our kitchen. I just try to keep all the "like" containers nested together with their lids tucked in on the side. Anyone have a better idea (without having to do something like replace all the containers with matching ones)?

The corner cabinet is where it gets really ugly. Check out those piles of crazy. This cabinet is the reason I wanted to tackle the whole lower cabinet reorganization project. Oy.

Moving on to the next area, which is on the right side of the oven, we have a drawer that holds our utensils and kitchen knives, and below that, a deep cabinet with with one shelf.

The utensil drawer is actually in fine shape (small victory!), so you won't get to see that one, but let's look at the lower area. More mess! The part that bothers me the most is the inefficiency and random placement of things. This is where we keep pots and pans, cutting boards, and a few other small things like the electric kettle (which is an appliance that I LOVE, by the way).

The final area is the under-sink cabinet. It's HUGE and really challenging to organize with all its plumbing and deep, dark, inaccessible recesses.

We, like many others I'm sure, keep our cleaning supplies, extra paper towels, dishwasher detergent, trash bags and extra paper bags in there. We also keep a few large, less frequently used appliances as well including the Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer, griddle and food processor.

That'll do it for the tour of kitchen disarray. Have I embarrassed myself yet? Probably, but hey, that's what this project's all about! I'm ok with showing off my mess (a.k.a. real side).

So what have I done so far? 

Well, I've...

• Cleaned out two of the little drawers, which are now EMPTY (save for some paper napkins) since I consolidated and moved some things around. 
• Emptied both the lazy susan corner cabinet and the other full size cabinet, cleaned them, and re-organized them very differently. Hopefully this will be more efficient than what I was working with before!

But, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow to see the after photos of those areas. Yep, I'm teasing you today! This before post turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated, so you're going to have to come back for Part 2 tomorrow. I promise it'll be worth the wait! I've still got one small drawer and the kitchen sink cabinet to organize too, so you'll be seeing a few more posts on this project!

Meanwhile, here are some photos of the kitchen "in-process." Thankfully, there's a happy ending coming to make up for all this mess...

Empty cabinets = progress. :)

But take a look at our kitchen during the clean-out! Yikes. I can't believe we have this much stuff in just the lower cabinets.

See you back here tomorrow for the prettier, more organized side of this project!