3D Kitchen (declutter, deep clean and decorate)

Stephanie over at Somewhat Simple has come up with this great Fall Challenge:



Every week in October she picks the room for us to apply the 3 D's - declutter, deep clean and decorate. Luckily, it doesn't have to be all of the room that we deep clean!! Or I would be doing this until Christmas!!

This week, she started us off easy...

Um, not quite!

She started us with the kitchen! The most clutter attracting room in the house. But, hey, I like challenges so I dove right in.

Decluttering

Well, the cabinets over my microwave were a mess (understatement of the century).



And my counter, which is supposed to be a desk, was full of stuff - important stuff I'm sure - but stuff none the less. And I could never find the particular stuff that I was looking for because of all the other stuff I wasn't looking for.


So, I took an hour...or two and pulled everything out and threw away a lot of junk, then put it back, hopefully in a neater, more logical order.


(It was right after my birthday. See my cards.)


Decorate

OK, for me, this was definitely the hardest one to do. I don't have much wall space in my kitchen and the only other thing I could think of to decorate (without involving lots of money or time) was the space above my cabinets. We didn't have any extra money in our budget to go buy decorations for that, so I did this instead. I got this idea from here and here. I already had the Creative Memories Keepsake Display and decided to reappropriate it. The display is magnetic on the front already which made this much easier. I took 2 pages of my scrapbook paper and made half a boyish color and half a girly color. I used letter stickers to put on the days of the week initials for each kid. Then I printed labels like "pack", "buy", "piano", "dance", "PE", etc for each child. Using magnets that I didn't care about anymore (i.e. free ones), I cut them up and taped them to the back of the labels. Now we can move everything around at the beginning of the week and just look on our board to find out what to take to school each day.

This cool display opens up as well. I don't have anything in the French memo board side yet, but all sorts of important school stuff is in the pocket on the right.

Deep Clean

Whew! Almost done! Only thing left is deep cleaning. This was my yucky mess in the bottom of my oven.

And a similar yucky mess in my microwave.

Lucky for me, my oven is self-cleaning...well mostly. I turned on the self clean cycle for a while. It didn't turn off by itself and the house was getting really hot, so I went ahead and turned it off. All I had to do then (after letting it cool down, of course) was wipe it out with a sponge. It looks so pretty, I may have to refrain from cooking in it for a while. Hmmm, sounds like a good reason to order pizza.

I looked online (the source of all knowledge) to find easy ways to clean a microwave. The easiest was involved vinegar, which I didn't have. The second easiest way involved a lemon, which I didn't have either. So I went with choice 3 - put a bowl of hot, soapy water in there and nuke it. Then the grime comes right off. Seriously, it was easy to clean at that point.
I also cleaned my kitchen window inside and out. I didn't take a picture of that, because, really, what would you have been able to see? But my wonderful husband paid me a compliment when he got home from work and asked who turned on the high definition in the window!!

OK, so that's a long post, but I DID IT!! I really worked on my kitchen this week and I'm proud of myself. So you be proud of me too :).