Oh, folks. That poor kitchen of ours was in dire need of attention. Not that the REST of the house doesn’t need a bit of it, too, but the kitchen? Scary.

There was SO much stuff in there that wasn’t ours — stuff left behind by the previous tenants that was ‘gifted’ to us. Most of it was in iffy condition, and has been clogging up the cabinets to the point where we don’t have room for any of it anymore. Or, for that matter, stuff we DO use.

Add to the problem by making the cabinets sit there in various stages of disrepair and grime, and you’ve got a recipe for Crazy Wife, which is never a good thing.

So last night, I tackled one of them. I got the biggest box I could find, and dug into this:

That’s the left and right sides of just one of the cabinets near the floor next to the oven. The bottom of it is disgusting and still needs to be lined (possibly with something totally antibacterial….I mean…LOOK AT IT…ick!), but, after getting rid of everything left there by the previous owners, or anything of ours that was beyond saving or was missing parts, and voila:

Three items left. THREE. (The stack of plates is being washed and will be in with our plates, but I moved them after this was taken.) And one of them, the bowl in the upper left, is iffy. It still might go. But it’s all 1960’s fantabulousness and has an avocado and blue handpainted flower on the bottom, and I kind of love it a little, in that I-heart-kitsch kind of way.

Scarier still is the stuff we got rid of:

Those boxes weigh around fifty pounds. Seriously. Probably more, even. Two sets of mismatched dishes. Old tupperware. A non-functioning crock pot. A food processor that’s missing a crucial part. An old blender that hasn’t worked in more than fifteen years now and lit on FIRE when we tested it. THREE DOZEN teacups of dubious origin. (Don’t worry — I checked ebay first. Nothing in that box was selling for more than $2 a set.) FIVE glass pie plates. FIVE. Even I do not eat that much pie, and I LIKE pie.

Of all of it — only the food processor was ours. Everything else was already here when we moved in. And now we have at least one cabinet that can breathe again, and I’m starting to get motivated to fill up the dumpster before tomorrow’s pick-up.

I’m trying to get rid of as much as I can, and I’m aiming for 50% — meaning that I’d like to get rid of half of the items we have in the kitchen right now, since we really, REALLY don’t need as much as we have. There’s just too much, and most of it is non-functional. I’m thinking that with about half of it gone, I can actually store things in there, or *cook*, go figure. Plus, it means there’s open space for us to buy things WE like, rather than just whatever’s in there.

Which kind of leads me to “G” on that alphabet meme that I’m going through slowly here: Garbage. Technically, it’s “garbage disposal”, but since I don’t have one of those and haven’t really missed it all that much, I thought I’d talk a little about garbage for a second.

This is going to make me unpopular. I know it already. But all this stuff? Totally going in the dumpster. (We have a commercial dumpster since this is technically commercial property.) As much as I’d love to recycle it or take it in for donation, the fact of the matter is that if I had to wait to schedule a pickup, it wouldn’t get done. It would all sit here, eventually moved to the side and ignored, and probably end up in the Garage of Doom. Right now, it’s more important to me to get it out of here than it is to worry too much about the plates in the garbage.

I’m offsetting the environmental impact of my cleaning by buying an insane percentage less than I did before, since I know what I have already (instead of accidentally buying multiples, which I’ve done), and because I don’t want to clutter up the now-with-breathing-room cabinets again. I’m reducing not only my own consumerism, but helping to avoid unnecessary packaging that would normally also go in the dumpster. So I figure it’ll balance out. And I’ll plant some trees or something when the weather’s not so…uh…weathery. (It’s snowing here. Again. It’s getting old.)

I did order a few books on housewifery, and they should be here tomorrow. So my next entry will probably include a review, if they’re worth even mentioning. (One of them I got last time? “How to Not Be a Desperate Housewife” by someone or other. And it was horrible. I mean, not even worth the trees that died to print it. Stereotypical, and in places, downright offensive. I was really thinking that this woman should probably stick to the laundry, but then I realized that she’s probably got someone else doing it for her. It was frustrating, but at least it was short. It’s gone now, thankfully. I didn’t even want it in my house.)

But to end on a positive note: I LOVE that the kitchen’s getting some attention now. And I got a bolt I needed to start biking on the bike trainer again, so that’s going to help my overall energy level….which means I’ll be able to get more of the housewifey-stuff done, too.

It’s amazing to me how everything affects everything else in this life.

Off to watch movies with my man! (He’s watching some horror movie that I’d never watch if he wasn’t there. :>)