Spring Break came and went so fast.

Most educators probably say that, though.

I’m not ready to go back to school tomorrow.

Most probably say that, too.

While I didn’t get quite as much done in my 21 Bag Challenge as I would have hoped, I did make a lot of headway and, overall, my house feels a lot more organized, open, and less cluttered.

As you can see from my list, I do still have some ways to go, but did make quite a bit of progress:

The main part of the house that hasn’t been done yet, is the Office.  It’s such a multi-purpose space for us.  It has our office stuff (obviously), our bookshelves, we store seasonal stuff in there, clothing overflow is in there, our laundry area is in there.  It all fits in there, it just needs to be better organized.

But it was the one room that was barely touched (all the laundry was done, though).  It just sort of gave me a headache thinking about it.  I’ll get to it probably over the next couple of weekends.

I’m pretty proud of the majority of the rest of my house though.

I spent a few hours on my kitchen early in the week; deep cleaning the appliances, wiping down the counters and cabinet fronts and going through the closets.  Storage lacks in our kitchen.  From just looking at our kitchen, it looks like we have a decent amount of cabinets for a galley-style kitchen.  While that’s true, the cabinets aren’t that deep, so the space isn’t as vast as it may seem.

Our pantry space is pretty small and can become disorganized pretty easily.  I’ve tried several different things, like using bins to group things together, taking stuff out of boxes for more space, etc, and it just doesn’t work.  For us, when stuff is in bins it has a tendency to become “out of sight, out of mind”, and it winds up going bad/stale before it’s eaten.

Before, it was just a hot mess:

Yeah, that middle shelf was buckling a bit.  It’s not an optical illusion.

After is better….

If anyone has any surefire organization tips for small pantries, I would love to hear them. This is much better (and no not everything got thrown away, a lot was donated, but some stuff that had lived past it’s prime was trashed) but I feel like it could be more….user friendly, maybe?  I don’t know.  But yeah, I’m open to any tips and suggestions.

The top of our fridge is where the big stuff/pantry overflow goes because, again, not a ton of space.

Because our pantry was insane, this place was also just as disorganized.  Now, we can actually get into that closet back there (it houses little used appliances in our kitchen).

Our dining room was another area I spent a good amount of time in.  It was a space we weren’t utilizing well.  One corner had just bags of stuff that didn’t really belong there and hadn’t been put away yet, as you can kind of see here:

For a long time my dining room was a space I didn’t know what to do with.  There’s absolutely no storage space in the area and it’s not that big of a space.  The only real furniture in it was the dining room table (which I hate, but that’s a different story).  So I decided I had to get some sort of storage piece for that area.  It couldn’t be big because there’s not room for it, but it needed to have some functional space for me to store stuff that we don’t use that often (like our bread maker and that unopened George Foreman Grill you see up there).

I went browsing on Wayfair and found a cute, compact, and functional console table that would fit in our small area. It had great reviews, and the best part, it was so easy to put together.  It took me all of 20 minutes to assemble it.  It’s very sturdy, which the reviews stated, but it’s even moreso than I expected it to be.  It fit our area perfectly.

Feel free to ignore that price tag.  And yes, those are the baskets I found in my Front Closet.  That’s also the decanter set that Devon’s aunt gave us, now we just need to fill the decanter.  But the dining room actually feels more functional with the console in it and after all the excess crap was moved to it’s appropriate location.

I still really hate our dining room table (hate the chairs more, which is why I took them out of the picture) but it’s not getting replaced until we move, so I’m going to need a table cloth or something.  If it matched all the rest of the furniture in the house I might not care as much….maybe.  Still really don’t like it, though.  I like the rest of the room much better, though.

The kitchen and dining room were probably my biggest undertakings over break.  I did a couple other areas that I’ll talk about later.  But, I did also get to spend a good chunk of my break relaxing, doing some self-care (it’s counselor speak for getting my hair and nails done and going shopping) and catching up with some friends.

It’s been a nice week and a half off.  While most people aren’t really ever ready to go back to school, at least I’ll go back nice and relaxed tomorrow.

I wouldn’t be mad for an extra day, though….