Kitchen stuff

 Have you heard about this book?

It was published here in the US in October last year and now it's all over the place. I've seen so many articles on it and I'm even part of a facebook group that is just dedicated to her process. (There are just under 4,000 members now and about  new people are 500 add every few days.) Marie Kondo is apparently a huge celebrity in Japan. So logically, I was curious about this book.

The first hiccup happened when I was #9 on the waitlist at my library! What? I never have to wait for books. I was pretty peeved. But then on my decluttering groups, I started hearing about people who were #367 or even #523...I stopped complaining after that. On Friday, I received an email that it was waiting for me at the front desk. :)

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This weekend I read it, and I didn't really find that it was a must read for me. A big reason for this is that a lot of the information is online. I already knew about 2/3rds of the book just by reading articles and looking on pinterest. Another thing is that our home isn't a hopeless mess. It's pretty organized. That's not saying that her ideas aren't helpful, just some of her methods I found that we have our own system that works just as well. A few of her ideas I already do, like emptying my purse every day.

Then of course were the things I did find interesting.

1)  She says never let your parents find out what you are getting rid of. It causes them anxiety.

2) She was hired by a lady that was really organized but hired her to help figure out what was "off" about her home. In the end, they decided that there was too much "word clutter". Every time this lady opened up a cupboard or looked at something, her brain was confronted by information. I thought this was really interesting since I had just emailed an article to Matt earlier this week about this very subject. 

3) There is this thing she called the younger sister thing where you pass off all of the things you feel guilty about getting rid of to your younger sister even if she doesn't want them. 

4) She said in order to keep a clean house you need to have a vivid image in your head to motivation you. For us originally it was to have enough room that kids have enough room to play and that we wouldn't fight over the house. Now that we are getting to the point that it's very manageable that vision is expanding. Like a place to have people over or so we know where absolutely everything is. 

Madeleine's room has reached that point. When we get her ready for bed, I can actually tell if there are any toys that aren't put away. It's nice and it's a relaxing thought that I won't find any toys around the house when I reset to zero at the end of the night. 

I finished reading the book and Matt asked me what I wanted to do now that Madeleine was asleep. I told him I wanted to take everything out the kitchen since the furniture was out of the living room still from book club. So we did. Here is what it looked like.

We were pretty happy to see that we actually use 80% of this stuff on a weekly bases. We pared down a few of the 20% that we didn't use weekly or were broken.

It was lovely putting everything back. We have had so much empty space in our kitchen. So when we put everything back we were able to condense it down a bit. I was able to make Madeleine her own little shelf to keep her things and we still have an empty cupboard left that I put the craft supplies that Madeleine uses while I cook and extra lightbulbs. 

We also found out that we have a few things we really need to upgrade or replace. All of our measuring spoons and measuring cups are broken, and we need a long term plan for cups.

So yes, this is everything in our kitchen. It's about as minimal as we'll get as long as we keep up our currently diet and lifestyle.