Today my tiny project was the deep drawer in our kitchen that holds dish towels, cleaning cloths and aprons. When we moved in June, these items were placed in the drawer without much thought (the drawer was a different shape than the ones we used in our old house). It’s been functional but for the last six months I’ve frequently thought to myself, “I need to organize this better.”
So today was the day.
Here’s a before photo. What you can’t see are the many towels and rags lurking beneath the dish towels.
I emptied the contents of the drawer onto the dining room table and sorted them out. I had various types of dish cloths and cleaning cloths, as well as aprons in there.
Here’s a photo of the sorted piles—that drawer was like a clown car!
My husband is the cook in our family and he sometimes has strong opinions about things. So I consulted him. I learned that he hates the cloth diapers I bought for cleaning cloths years ago. (I typically use high-quality microfiber cloths now.) So it was easy for me to let go of those.
There were five aprons in the drawer, one of which is mine. He said he needs only two, so I kept the two with the longest ties. (His criterion.) There were a few dish towels with big holes, so those went into the discard pile as well.
I put the keepers back in the drawer. It doesn’t look that much different, but I love that the excess is gone and that it’s going to be easy to find what we need. I’m trying to avoid using paper towels for little clean-ups, so I kept a small pile of rags I’d cut from an old dish towel awhile ago and placed them next to the aprons.
Here’s the after photo.
Is it beautiful? Heck no. But it’s more functional and now I can check it off my mental list.
The project took about a half hour since I had to involve Barry. But it was a satisfying tiny project!
Stay tuned for more—I’m not sure whether I’ll post this weekend or wait until Monday.
Tagged with: 15 minutes, organizing, tiny projects