Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Deep cleaning and other goals

This week I decided it was time to get organized and get some things done. There isn't much I want to accomplish before we travel to Taiwan, but I would like to deep clean my house. I want to come home to a clean and organized home. So I've set some daily goals for myself:

30 minutes of exercise (trying to lose a couple of pounds)
60 minutes of Chinese (trying to become a tiny bit closer to fluent)
30 minutes of organizing/cleaning (beyond my normal chores)

So far so good! I've exercised both yesterday and today. I studied yesterday for 62 minutes and have 45 more to go today. And I've done 30 minutes of cleaning both yesterday and today. Here are a couple pictures of my progress.

before

after

before

after

before

after

I'm not sure the before and after photos look terribly different, but I did get rid of a few things. I am keeping the KonMarie principle in mind as I clean. "Does this bring me joy? If so, keep it. If not, get rid of it." I discarded some really old and ratty kitchen towels, outdated spices, and a few instruction manuals that are available online. And now all three of these cupboards are scrubbed down and organized.

If we have a few dollars extra before we leave, I'd like to buy a spice rack. My spices are almost all bulk purchases from Whole Foods so I have a ton of little baggies on the bottom shelf of my cabinet. It is a mess! It's hard to cook because I have to pull out handfuls of baggies and sort through them to find the spice I'm looking for. I'm doing to do some research to see if the bulk spices are actually fresh or if I should just buy jarred. If I go to the bulk route, I want to buy glass jars to store what I purchase. If I go the jarred route, I want to toss out everything I have and buy the staples I need. Either way, I'd like to organize the spices so that I can start teaching my daughter how to cook.

Half an hour still until the Women's World Cup game between Japan and Netherlands so I'm going to sneak in some Chinese studies before the game.

Happy cooking!

4 comments:

moominmamma said...

I love using baby food jars for spices. We didn't buy baby food but I found it easy enough to collect from friends with young ones who did. I spray-paint the lids matte black and then use chalkboard markers to label them. You can see the result here. Almost Pinterest-worthy if I do say so!

Julie Fukuda said...

I spent the whole week my husband was n the hospital cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen and tossing out-dated and excess stuff. Within only a few days it was back to where it had been before.Sigh! At least what quilting I do, stays done.

Jason and Michelle said...

I started to organize my pantry, I just need to finish. Projects are endless here :)

Cassandra said...

Miranda, that is a brilliant idea. Thank you!!