Kitchen Decluttering: How to live with less and love what you have more!

Well, I'm back! So good to be in the YB Cafe again. In the past three months, ManO, my dearly beloved, had a stroke. Papa Jack, ManO's dad, suffered from a different kind of stroke. And I broke my foot. Big sigh.

Years ago, a friend advised me, "When life gets out of control, declutter!"  Point being, clutter is something you can control. You throw away stuff that stresses you out. You see concrete results. I ultimately threw away 24 bags of trash, took 40 bags to thrift store and four truckloads to the dump over 40 Days thanks to a wonderful blogger who posted about her own journey, 40 Bags in 40 Days.  Not only did I lose stuff, I gained muscle mass with all that carrying to the car and down from the attic and lost a lot of that out of control feeling.

Nothing gets more cluttered than my kitchen. It was the job I dreaded the most but I learned a lot.

1) A clean counter is one less obstacle to cooking...unless you don't want to mess it up.

A clean counter is a thing of beauty.

2)  You don't need a whole cabinet of coffee mugs and tea cups. A shelf will do.

The thrift store got a lot of freebie mugs I collected over the years. I keep the good stuff.

3)  With the advent of virtual cooking sites like Allrecipes.com and specialty allergy sites, my cookbooks were woefully out of date. But I kept ones from ManO's and my early days for sentimental reasons. That's also the reason I kept my Laura Ingalls Wilder Cookbook. Pure sentiment. I am not going to be roasting a pig's tail any time soon.

Yep, they are stained and ripped but cookbooks on the top row and middle kept us alive as newlyweds.

4) If you don't keep every dull knife, melted plastic measuring spoon, broken peeler, etc., you have a lot more room in your drawers for what you use every day.

5) Are you really keeping your important kitchen implements in the right place?  I had stuffed my collection of kitchen towels and oven mitts in a tiny drawer. It was constantly getting stuck when I opened it. I had a bigger drawer only half full of sandwich bags, plastic wraps and parchment paper. Off to a shelf on my pantry they went and voila! Plenty of space for my linens and such. Some folks move their utensils to a crock on the counter by the stove.  Others use a hanging rack.  Whatever you choose, make the most of your space.

So what about you? Have you done a kitchen declutter lately, ever? What is the one thing you just can't throw out for sentimental reasons?