Coronavirus Clutter Cure

If you are like my family during coronavirus, you are feeling a little antsy and have a lot of pent up energy that isn't being expended in its usual ways.  We find our morning routines slowed way down, less rush, we often don't get out of our pajamas until 10 am (on particularly slow days we don't even change out of them). On bad weather days, after we have exhausted all the fun indoor activities, I find my kids pretty willing to do chores around the house as long as they are presented as a 'fun activity' and not a chore (I get it, I was young once too).

So I thought I'd use the same logic to trick myself into a 'chore' by trying to organize my kitchen cupboards and make it into a sorting game.  That might not sound like a ton of fun, but if you are a visual person like me, the visual calm you get from opening a well organized cupboard is so pleasing. It's the little things, haha.

A good place to start with organizing is to just take everything out (everything) and put into like categories. Next you figure out storage container options.  I pick up some mason jars at the thrift store a while back as well as some larger bulk item storage containers from The Container Store for things like rice/oatmeal/cereal/etc. Since we had been living in our current kitchen setup for a while, I had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't in terms of locations of items.  Spices, oven mitts, stirring spoons, etc all belonged over close to the stove, the snack cupboard needed to be accessible to the kids. All the baking stuff could be tucked away near the kitchen island, etc. Then once I figured out locations for things, I put them into the lidded jars and up on the shelves (more frequently used item being near the bottom, less frequently used item near the top).

This new organization has helped a lot with kitchen efficiency.  And it looks so much better than the cluttered, unorganized mess that was there before. Next thing on my list is to get a good label maker for all these bulk containers.