Spring Cleaning! Oh, it's so revealing

I spent most of the week marinating on the couch, working through a single sleeve of saltines and nursing a stomach flu. Matt did a great job of taking care of me, but the result of spending a week in place is a lot of detritus. This somehow put into focus the collected clutter of the entire winter. After our first attempt of doing dishes and tidying up, we decided this was a different kind of project altogether. We went to Costco, bought some bins and then decided to rip up the house.

I started in the pantry, Matt in the bathroom. We threw out skads of junk, expired meds, stale cereal, unlabeled who knows what... And the result is having full access to all the countertops in the kitchen (Thank you, thank you!), and the pantry is thoughtfully lumped together. Do you know we have an entire shelf of tomato products (V8, paste, diced, sauces)? and another of beans? And while I have a gallon of quinoa, I only have a single box of noodles? Matt devastated the bathroom- there is actually space in the medicine cabinet, and two trash cans later, we actually have space for linens in the linen closet. Wow!

The result of such earnest work, is that the rest of the house is collecting cardboard boxes and other recycling. It looks like we are moving. But there have been some exciting finds as we start to think about the bedroom- I found my glasses, my chemistry modeling kit, and Matt liberated a bunch of space in the front closet. While I am feeling more inclined to trash things we don't need/want right away, Matt would prefer to organize everything we have for future consideration (ergo, working happily in separate rooms) (Also our bathroom is too tiny for more than one occupant). The next project is the bedroom though, so we'll see what kind of compromise we can swing.