Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Kitchen Overhaul, and What Santa Brought Us

If being robbed means that you come home and your house looks empty and your stuff is missing, I imagine that the opposite of being robbed would be if someone pulled everything you own out of its place and put it on the floor in plain sight.  One day, between Christmas and New Years, I came home to this:
And this:
Pictured: everything from my kitchen pulled out if its place and dumped in the dining room.

To be fair, it was a project that Erica and I had talked about, especially since a majority of our wonderful Christmas gifts were kitchen-related.  We needed to re-organize and make room for the new stuff, pitch some old stuff, and deep-clean the cabinets.  I just didn't expect to come home to it looking like I'd been transplanted into a Hoarders-type situation.

As tired and hungry as I was, though, I pitched in, because I couldn't wait to see the final product.  It was good, we pared down a lot of kitchen gadgets that we haven't used since moving in, wiped down the inside of  all the cabinets, and found some stuff that we had lost to the sheer depth of some of our drawers  (welcome back, decorative cheese knives!). 

When I came home the next day the kitchen looked like this: 

And our once-hopelessly-disorganized spice cabinet like this:
I took the advice of commenter Alicia from my September post about my messy spice cabinets
 and ordered a  spice organizer off of Amazon.  I could use a second one, actually!

I'm super happy with how everything turned out!  And all our new stuff has a home, which was the biggest concern, although we were elated about what our super-generous family gave us.  Erica's mom gave us our first stand mixer, and Erica's looking forward to making her own bread.  My grandparents got us an 11-cup Cuisinart food processor,  which has been a huge lifesaver already, because before, all I had was a little 1-cup chopper.  Needless to say veggie burgers just got a thousand times easier.  (Also, special thanks to everyone who's asked if I've cut myself on the processor blade yet.  Thanks for the vote of confidence, but the answer is yes.  Yes I have.)

Other faves have included an olive oil mister from Erica's brother, a set of five clear food storage containers from her dad and stepmom, and a cookbook from my mom that we've used four times already since Christmas.  It, and the food processor, helped us make this amazing pizza, our first shot at using yeast/making dough.
I cannot wait to have this again!

Overall, the holiday season was kind to us, and we're nowhere near tired of our new toys yet, so I'll continue posting about all the other fun stuff we get into.

2 comments:

  1. Wow valerie you and erica did a fantastic job...i love your blog and your dedication to changing your life.

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  2. Thanks, Betty! And thanks for following. Now that I'm not watching TV, I should be updating more frequently =D

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