Kitchen Clean Up

The morning began like any other morning ~ feeding the animals and having my morning paper and coffee ritual. And because I had an appointment at 11:00 AM, I spent the time before I had to leave crocheting.

However, once I got back I got right down to business.

Today's project involved cleaning out the pantry and kitchen cupboards. Believe me, that was an all-day project. And even though I decided to call it quits shortly after 6:00 PM, there still remained some work to be done. But not much.

The first area attacked was the pantry. There was buggy food stuff to throw out, unopened food that I will never use to pack away to give to the food pantry, stuff to set aside to pack away, and mucho cleaning and organization.

That took a good long time. I found things that I did not even know that I had, such as cans of tuna and tomato paste.

After I was done cleaning out the pantry, Ariana and I left to pick up Jeremiah, who was ripe and ready to do some cleaning of his own.

Shortly after we came back, Carol stopped by for a brief visit and to bring some extra packing cartons. She was very impressed with the now-pristine and organized state of the pantry.

The next project involved the cupboards above the long counter and matching up lids to plastic food storage containers. There were far more lids than containers.

By now I had managed to fill a 55-gallon garbage bag, which I called a "body bag." There were already 3 bags of food to bring to the pantry.

While I cleaned in the kitchen, Jeremiah and Ariana set themselves to cleaning in the workout room, filling bags of trash, removing unwanted stuff to put across the street for free take-away (which occurred withing minutes), vacuuming the floor, and vacuuming the cobwebs off the walls and ceiling.

Ariana also did a couple of loads of dishes so that I will be able to pack away dishes on another day.

I also had Ariana got through the multitude of bottles of nail polish so see which ones need to be gotten rid of. I went through Ariana's rejects and selected the shades that I liked.

Afterwards, Jeremiah decided that he would have fun playing with the final rejected bottles of polish, while Ariana decided to apply some fake nails that I found and then paint her nails.

At first Jeremiah decided to just paint a plastic plate with the rejected nail polish. And when that was no longer fun, he took the bottles into the workout room and started splattering them, a la Jackson Pollack (whose birthday Ariana shares, by the way), on a large piece of plywood, first taking care to place another piece of wood underneath it so that it the polish would not stain the floor.

Not being satisfied enough with the splattered nail polish, Jeremiah then took a can of spray paint and began applying it to his chef d'oeuvre.

At this point I had to butt in. The air was heavy with volatile organic compounds. I could smell them in the kitchen. Plus I was dealing with the fumes from the Greased Lightning. So I had to put my foot down and order Jeremiah to stop polluting the air.

Good boy, he listened.

Cleaning out the medicine cupboard presented another challenge in that I had to check the expiration dates of all the medicines, vitamins, and supplements. A lot had to be thrown out. And I found my wrist split which had remained missing for ages.

The 2 recycling buckets were past overflowing ~ so much so that I had to grab the giant green bin from the workout room. That bin was nasty and filthy. So that needed a good application of Greased Lightning as well.

Now I was ready to load the recyclables into that giant green bin. But before I could do that, Jeremiah grabbed it and started tossing it around such that he broke it by having a hole form in the bottom corner. I yelled at him. Chastened, he grabbed a roll of duct tape and patched the hole.

Once I filled that bin up with recyclables, I took the other 2 bins to use to paper and cardboard. There was a lot of cardboard to break down.

After the medicine cupboard was cleaned out, I worked on the lower and upper lazy-Susan cupboards. They were the nastiest ones yet, with sticky spills from honey and cooking oils.

Between the medicine cupboard and the lazy-Susan cupboards, I found more stuff to give to the food pantry. So now I had 4 bags for the pantry.

When the cupboards were all cleaned out, I reorganized everything. The medicines, vitamins, and first aid stuff went into the cabinets above the long counter.

And what was previously the medicine cupboard now held the nail polish, polish remover, cotton balls, and most of the stuff that I had on the counter underneath, such as cookbooks, and mine and Ariana's tax stuff.

I even cleaned out the little cupboard next to the trash compactor. Good thing I did. I forgot that our good meat-carving set was in that cupboard.

So now, the only cupboards that are left is that tiny cupboard to the right of the lower lazy-Susan cupboard, the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink (which is actually in pretty good shape), and the cupboards underneath the long counter.

All of that can wait for another day. I have done enough today.