Organizing my home

In 2012, I am embarking on a big project that has, or at least had, a little too do with cooking. It's called the 52-Week Home Organization Challenge. Each Monday, I have received a prompt for organzing some part of the house. The first four weeks dealt with the kitchen - counters, cupboards, the pantry and the refrigerator. I actually had to deal with reorganizing my pantry in Week 1 in order to get a ton of food off the counter, but Week 3 led to some interesting discoveries about how old my spices were, and a reorganization of what I didn't throw out from my spice rack.

Weeks 1 and 2 both resulted in some cute new accessories for me. They are the storage container box and the canisters pictured above. Of course, I had to be cheap in these endeavours, just as I am with food. The canisters are from Goodwill. And the storage box is the very box 2/3 of my excessive collection of storage containers came in. It had been just sitting there on the counter looking ugly for a long time. Meanwhile, I've had a collection of pattern paper in several different colors sitting in my stash since 2005, and it didn't seem like the yellow ones would be used on a layout anytime soon. So, they're now covering my box!

I believe the 52-Week Organization Challenge moves on to a different part of the house next week. I hope I accomplish as much with the future challenges as I did with the first four. (Although I was actually pleasantly surprised about how little food had to go when I cleaned out the fridge!) I am not sure how the rest will go, because I live with a packrat, and I am a bit of one too. If it had been up to me, we'd only have as many storage containers as actually fit in that box. I also would have gotten rid of some of the coffee cups and other items cluttering up two shelves in my dining room, and a collection of magnets cluttering up the front of my refrigerator. But Don wants to keep all of these things, so we still have them. Hopefully, his collections won't stop me from improving the rest of the house.

I know one room that can be improved without his blessing is my scrapbook room. As it doubles as the home office and his clothes closet, he would love to see some improvement there. He also would love to see it well enough organized that I don't keep hauling stuff into other rooms so I can work with it more easily. My hope is that the challenges for that area are broken into small enough pieces that I can do each in a week. Also, I think that's going to require an investment in a little more expensive storage than ceramic canisters, so I hope the funds will allow.