Friday, March 2, 2012

Under the Kitchen Sink

Another snow day means another organization project! If you're from New England, I'm sure you got dumped on yesterday just like me. Nothing like some snow, then rain, then more snow, then digging your car out of 4" of ice! Well, I decided to take the time to clean out under our kitchen sink. A few years ago (yes, years) I accidentally flooded my kitchen. Apparently I left the kitchen faucet running over night, and the sink was so full of dishes that the water just cascaded off a plate near the faucet, onto the counters, the floor, into the half bathroom. Water was everywhere! It was horrible. We cleaned up the water everywhere, except I never actually emptied the cabinet under the sink, where the water sluiced down and into. Again, sometimes I wonder if I'm insane and not fit to live on my own.


This is pretty much what I started with. I had already started taking plastic bags out (yes, this is pretty much an in progress shot, not straight from the beginning... how sad!). We keep grocery plastic bags to clean the kitty box, but as you can see they got pretty out of hand. No one needs that many.


I started out by simply just taking everything out. I came across a few things that shouldn't have been in there in the first place; raid, motor oil... Then I got rid of all the bags, trash, expired cleaning agents.


This is what I was left with. A lot of rust stains and melted dish washer tablets. I surprisingly didn't find any mold except for on some cloths that were kept in the back for polishing our dining table. I also didn't find any scary bugs, which I totally expected.


I took the razor blade I use for cleaning my ceramic cook top and scraped the whole thing down (not hard enough to ruin the cabinet) and everything came off easily. Then I just took some of my Mrs. Meyer's lemon verbena cleaner, gave it a good spray, and viola! Its like a whole new cabinet.


I had a few Dollar Tree baskets kicking around, so I loaded one up with sponges, clothes, Swiffer pads, steam mop pads, and the like, and the other contains the actual cleaning supplies. How awesome is this?! $2 and an awesome, useable space for my cleaning supplies.

Anyone else have a snow day? Any organizing projects lately?

4 comments:

  1. You didn't send me all the inbetween shots. HAHA. That thing was a mess.

    The house is getting cleaned - one cabinet at a time :D

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    1. Haha- what'd you think, it was pristine? That shit was whack!

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  2. I had one of those "has it really been this bad for this long?" moments a couple weeks ago, and in between cookies and watching old episodes of Clean House have been trying do honest-to-goodness Spring Cleaning. I keep my plastic bags, too! I have no idea why, though. I can't even use them as garbage bags because my town requires that we use a specific kind of bag that I have to purchase at grocery or convenience stores. P.S. My town is in Japan, and we also have to separate the burnable from the non-burnable garbage.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, Laurel! You're my first commenter aside from my boyfriend, super exciting!

      I have an unfortunate amount of those moments, but once you take care of them it feels so rewarding. Totally worth it. Burnable garbage? I've never heard of that. Do they have recycling, too?

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