The Great Clean and Purge Project – Week Four Update

This week has been kind of a filthy one.

We’ve tackled some of the bigger and – for lack of a better word – ickier jobs. We worked on the “deep clean” phase of The Great Clean and Purge Project. These are the jobs nobody likes to do. Saddle up and ride with me, friends…This week, we have…

• Cleaned the kitchen cabinet faces – ugh. I am an avid home chef. I love to cook. I am not necessarily neat when I do so. Do we clean up the kitchen after a meal? Of course. Do we up kitchen grease? Sure. Do we sometimes often OK most of the time give the cabinets a lick and a promise? Yeah. We do. You do it, too. Admit it. And then we kick ourselves repeatedly because they need a heavy-duty. But I’m happy to report that the kitchen cabinets are now about as clean as kitchen where nobody cooks.
• Cleaned the top of the cabinets. Yes, the top. The really high up there part above the cabinets. And in our kitchen, it’s really high because we have those blasted extended height cabinets. The Hub got up on the kitchen step ladder and went to town. It’s amazing how much ick accumulates up there, even in a kitchen you think is pretty clean. Newsflash: no one’s kitchen is as clean as they imagine it is. Except maybe my Mother’s because she is truly the Queen of Clean. Dirt runs scared from her. Seriously.
• Disposed of the kitchen basket collection. Know why? Because I can’t remember why I decided a collection of baskets was cool. Because the Hub apparently never liked it. And mostly because the kitchen basket collection was more of a dust and kitchen grease collection. Out they went. All of them. OK, minus two really cute ones that escaped the dust and grease.
• Cleaned out the kitchen pantry and cabinets and purged SO much stuff. This all kind of moshes together. We needed to purge things we weren’t using. Many were novelty type gifts given to us by people who thought we’d enjoy them. And we did. We enjoyed them once or twice, then they found their way into the back of a cabinet and we forgot we owned them. An overabundance of wine glasses. And coffee mugs. And half sets of pots and pans. Old kitchen gadgets. We also needed to find a better organization system and a better way of storing things so that they were more accessible to the user. Mission accomplished. Now there are empty shelves in the cabinets. Empty, I tell you.
• Cleaned out the silverware drawer and the “other drawer.” This is not to be confused with the junk drawer – that’s still the junk drawer. But that got a fair shake, too. That is purposeful junk in there. Turns out the Hub hated the silverware drawer where it was located, so we switched the two drawers back to the way they were when we moved in and before we switched them in the first place. No one remembers why we moved them, but the current arrangement is definitely more logical.
• Hung some more art. These are mostly relocations – we put the framed print of Neuschwanstein Castle that came to the marriage with the Hub in a great spot in the stairway and a set of Camelot-related Guinevere prints in the library. We added a very funny photo of my Cousin and me taken in old-fashioned early costume at an amusement park to the downstairs powder room. It’s hysterical and hung in my Grandparents’ house for years. After their house was sold, I ended up with the print and where else do you put something that hysterical but in the guest powder room?
• Moved out a pile of give-aways that are going to a younger cousin and another pile for a friend. Still have a few for the local thrift shop and another friend, but those will go as soon as we make arrangements. It feels good to give things to someone else who can use them. It feels good to move those things out of our house, too!
• Cleaned out the garage. This was huge. HUGE. When we moved in here, a friend told us to make sure we never used our garage for storage space. Pffffft! For a while, we heeded that advice. And then life happened. And a kid. And suddenly you’re too busy to clean out the garage and the next thing you know it’s a storage room. Couple that with the fact that this house does not come equipped with adequate storage closets and it’s a losing battle. Until you decide to do a Great Clean and Purge, that is. And so for the better part of last Thursday, the Fab Hub disappeared into the garage to make sense of what was for sale or donation, what was just plain old garbage, and get things organized for the next phase: The Great Yard Sale.

And if you’re still reading (thanks for still reading) and you’re kind of wondering why I think anyone gives a hoot about our cleaning and purging, well, there will be more on that probably next week. This has purpose. This has meaning. This actually connects to several other areas of life right now. So, friends, revel in the cleanliness and peace with me…

…and come back next week for what I hope will be the final installment of the Great Clean and Purge Project. And if you’ve missed any of the fun along the way, you can catch up with the links below.

Oh, and please try not to notice the stuff sitting out on the counters…we were fresh off two grocery trips today and hadn’t quite finished putting things away. I like it so much better when the countertops are clear!

Week One

Week Two

Week Three