Clean & Almost Painless Kitchen: January Cure

I did it. I survived the weekend while actually cleaning my kitchen. That sucker is possibly cleaner than it's ever been in the 4 years of living here. The insides & outs of every cabinet got a thorough cleaning & almost everything got a new home that made more sense. I even cleaned the inside of my oven. At 8pm. On a Sunday night. With an injured arm. At some point during the cleaning process I pulled a muscle in my arm from the shoulder to elbow. Ridiculous, right?

It took me two days to complete & I lost momentum right about here:

I had to call upon my best friend for some motivation to finish. Lucky for Ryan, I took the advice & he didn't have to stare at that madhouse for months. & look! I have a functioning pantry that isn't on the ground!

*Side note: Do you see that back splash? What is that? It always looks dirty no matter how much you scrub & iritates the crap out of me! It is like huge sheets of some sort of matte metal with square tiles etched into it. It's also used as the counter top on each side of the oven (see above). You can also see the horrible brown color that is my kitchen. The oven picture captures the color perfectly. The brown looked fine when our living room was green but when I painted it grey over a year ago, it lost it's charm. It needs to go.

My outbox grew substantially during this process & someone is going to get really lucky when they snag our "big trash day" pile off our curb tonight. Enjoy your new fully stocked kitchen, neighbor. I hope you get more use out of that mixer than I did. I might not have managed to downsize our food by 25% but I definitely managed at least that in kitchen dishes & small appliances. Look at those empty shelves!

I won't lie & say that I didn't run 2 laps around my house with my arms in the air, chanting & giving Ryan high fives at 10pm on Sunday when I finally sat down & threw in the towel.

I have a few smaller things that I didn't get to like cleaning the back door & scrubbing those floors but I got my entire month's project of finding a better pantry/organizing solution done so I'm not that worried about it. I even replaced old shelf liners that I've hated for 4 years & bought a dish shelf, like so, to get more function out of the cabinets! Now I can move on to something else on my huge overwhelming list.