Un-boxing

How to take things out of cardboard boxes, that is the question.  Or rather, where to put things as I take them out of boxes.

Drawers with labels.

I've been fairly deeply influenced by Julie Morgenstern's book "Organize yourself from the Inside Out".  She's an advocate of thinking in terms of zones of activity, and also in terms of labeling.

As a consequence, my kitchen things have gone from sitting inside labeled cardboard boxes to finding new homes inside labeled kitchen drawers and cabinets.  The cabinet labels, they're for helping family members figure out the new system.   The labels are temporary, until we all get used to this.   I made the labels on card stock, using a font I like, so they're not too ugly.  And they're held in place with minimal amounts of water-soluble Elmer's glue.   I'm hoping this means it'll be easy to remove them and clean the cabinets up in a month or so.

On the one hand, the cabinets in my kitchen are amazing in a good way.  They're custom built, and carefully designed.  They're beautiful.

But also, the cabinets are amazing in a what-the-heck way.  It's like, they were designed for someone who wanted a beautiful kitchen for people who cook by ordering pizza or Thai.   Because it's not a person-centric kitchen.  

The kitchen itself is kind of question-mark-shaped, so a surprisingly large number of cabinets are triangular, to accommodate the twists and turns.  The ceilings are 9 feet up, and the cabinets go all the way up, and of course the top cabinets are largely unreachable until we get a 3-step step stool.  On one side, the cabinets are a mere 11 inches deep, with hardly enough room to store large objects.   On the other wall, they're 25 inches deep, so anything that gets shoved to the back is likely to get lost behind other objects, especially on those higher shelves.  The counter space is broken up into four tiny pieces -- two of which are barely wide enough to hold a toaster; the longest stretch of counter space is 36".  

From the back door, you can see the kitchen curves around the stove
and then past the sink the other way, into the dining room.

From the dining room, looking at this odd space from the opposite direction.

I love the challenge of using this space.  It's such a great puzzle!

And because of Julie Morgenstern, I'm thinking of this puzzle not as a jigsaw puzzle, where I have to find spaces to hold the things I own, but as logic puzzle:  what do I want to do in the kitchen?  Where am I going to do it?  How can I make sure the thing I want to use is where I'll need it?  Then, I can think:  how do I pull things out of boxes?  Zones.  Labeling.  

Can opener pretending to be
a bat in a cave.

Take the can opener, for example.   In the past, my can opener has gone in a kind of "miscellaneous food prep" drawer, with scissors and markers that I use to label frozen food and such.  But this kitchen is skimpy on drawers, and so I had to get creative.  Where do I actually use my can opener?  When I'm opening cans, of course.  Where are the cans?  In the giant, 25-inch-deep cabinets near the refrigerator (food zone).  So the can opener goes with the cans, on a hook.  Voila!   I love this. 

In fact, I love hooks so much I hung a few other things, at least for now:

Ice cream scoops hang on the side of the fridge,
right where the ice cream is.

Canning jar ring hang on bent hangars in the canning jar zone.
Everyone has a canning jar zone in their kitchen, right?

In terms of zones, (keeping things near where we'd naturally use them), I've got

• the cooking zone near the stove and oven:  cast iron pans down low, cooking pots up higher, a dedicated cabinet for electric appliances.  
• a food zone near the fridge, with baking supplies on two sets of shelves, another skinny shelf for "sauces and snacks", and then deep deep cabinets for "food that needs prep" (like pasta and canned goods).    
• a food storage container zone, with an odd triangular cabinet for pyrex containers, a different odd L-shaped cabinet for canning jars, and a drawer for "canning jar bling" (lids, funnels, grabbers, etc). 

This label says "Canning Jar Bling". 
This is what it looks like when
I'm not wearing my reading glasses,
so now you see what I see.

So far, things seem to be working well, cross fingers.  I'm zoning the rest of the house, too (but of course), and doing my best to get those cardboard boxes out of our living spaces and into the homes of other people who are packing.    The place is looking more and more like a messy house, and less and less like a warehouse.   With any luck we can push through the messy phase into the "inviting" phase.

Un-boxing, man.  I love it.