I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted about minimizing the stuff in my life, but I still have been working on it. I haven’t done any more big overhauls since the basement closet, but small things here and there to make my home a little less cluttered and more organized have been taking place. I have recently found some really great organization blogs as well. My favourite right now is iheartorganizing, which is funny because that is the name of one of my posts I created before finding the website (I knew once I saw the title it’d be a blog I would quickly fall in love with).
But I digress. Today while my boyfriend was building a new pantry (I will write more about that once it’s complete), I decided to keep him company by doing some cleaning in the kitchen. Once the cleaning was done I was thinking of what I could do to pass time while we chatted and then I remembered the all-too-familiar feeling of trying to get a tupperware-like container out of the cupboard and having one of the following scenarios play out :
1. Try to take out a container and have multiple lids/containers come jumping out at me.
2. Find a suitable container and then be unable to find a lid that fit.
It was frustrating for sure. Here are some pictures of what I pulled out of the cupboard :
Pretty bad, I know. It didn’t take too long to get the collection whittled down. It’s probably a bit more than half of the size it was before. I wanted to get rid of even more, but I did not want to be too hasty so I figured in a month or two I will reassess if anything else is going unused and needs purged. The boyfriend did not want to get rid of a ton of it anyway as he uses it for his lunches more than I do, and I try not to be too pushy since he is patient enough with me already!
Here is what we got rid of :
And finally, what we decided to keep:
Now there is actually an entire half of a cupboard free which is great as we have very, very limited cupboard space in our kitchen. I’ve got some great mixing bowls that have been dying for a spot to be hidden away.
Do you have too much tupperware? Have you minimized your kitchen lately?
Actually I have been trying to get rid of plastic altogether and have been using glass mason jars instead. For bigger items like homemade soup I have been saving those gigantic glass pickle jars. I see you have the glass nesting bowls with the red plastic lids….those are great for lunch items and small bits of food. Wax paper is still a great choice for lunch box sandwiches.
I’d like to get everything to glass eventually as well. We have a huge glass container not pictured here because it’s too big for that cupboard which we put leftover meals in. Wax paper is good but then it creates more garbage which I’d like to not do. I did read somewhere that people wrap sandwiches in tea towels though so I might try doing that for Simon.
tea towels…great idea.
Your kitchen looks so bright in these pictures!!
My partner and I had finally gotten down to “just enough” of everything in our kitchen…and then we moved in with a roommate who has tons of stuff. Our poor little kitchen is overflowing!
Ahh ! That is so annoying. The joys of roommates :P. Maybe you can convince him/her for you to all go through it and pack away the things you have extras of?
And thank you, we have a big window and it was very bright when I took them. I love sunny spaces!
I did minimize my kitchen lately, and I blogged about it! :)
Oh I do remember reading that the first time I found your blog ! Yours was done in more depth than mine, I need to do pretty much everything still except for the tupperware. haha
Tupperware’s as good a place as any to start. I really want to get a small infuser iced tea pitcher so I can get rid of my big cumbersome iced tea maker. I’ve pared down a LOT though! Good luck on the rest of your kitchen.
Our kitchen is a DISASTER! The boy actually yelled at me the other day (jokingly of course) because I keep everything and then I just throw it in the cabinets for it to pile up.
haha it’s definitely a role reversal from our place. I’m sure you’ll get to it when you’re ready. :)
When we moved into our rental home 3 years ago we found that we had way too many plastic containers and lids, and the kitchen in this house is smaller. We crammed a lot of them into 1 cupboard and put the rest in the basement. Earlier this year I took out all of the ones that I hadn’t in touched in 2 years and tossed them into recycling.
We would like to upgrade to the glass storage containers too. My mother use to freeze meals and store leftovers in corning ware dishes, which worked well.
It’s funny the things you keep in the basement “just in case” and then do not miss them at all. It really shows you how little you could get by with ! The glass containers I have are great, once we get some different sizes I’m going to toss all of the plastic, can’t wait ! Is it a rule that all moms have corningware or something? I swear it must be. :P
Man, we need to do this will some of our containers in our cabinets. Like you, we’ve got tops to things popping out everywhere. Every few months or so, we have to go through and clean things up a bit.
Usually, we are very good at getting rid of things that are in the way or that we don’t need. This is especially true for toys. Holly can’t stand having toys laying all over the house. We find that the less stuff we have, the happier we are.
I had a similar problem. For my ,lids, I used a small plastic basket that fits in the cupboard nicely, which I pull down as needed. I did the same thing for spices. Then I stack the plastic containers in the cupboard. This saves so much room!
I had that setup at my rental home but it was my roommates. I do need to get small basket to keep lids organized. Good tip!!
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We have replaced most of our plastic with jars. They last forever (almost), don’t smell or stain and you can fit a lot in a small space. They are also bug and rodent proof if that ever became an issue. I like to buy produce in the summer and dehydrate it. I can mash a huge amount of dehydrated veggies into each jar. They make great soup in the winter.
I’d love to get a dehydrator!!! That sounds great. I love veggie soups in the winter!