better living in 5 minutes a day #14:clean under the kitchen sink

I don't know about you, but the area under the kitchen sink in our house is never going to be pretty. I think if you have a new kitchen, it could be, but ours isn't. My goal in spending time organizing it is to keep it from being gross and nonfunctional.

Here's the "before" picture.  Every time I have to get something from down there, I feel frustrated.

Here are my suggestions for spending five minutes making it better.

1. Put a towel on the floor and sit on it. (This is just a comfort thing. Ha.)

2. Take everything out from under the sink.  Working quickly, sort everything into three sections on your kitchen floor:

• stuff you use regularly
• stuff you never use and can throw or give away (I had several containers of cleaning products I'd bought just because they were on sale, but never once used in a year!), and
• stuff you use regularly, but not in the kitchen, and which should be elsewhere

Throw or give away the throw/give away stuff. :) When you're all done with this project, put the elsewhere stuff elsewhere.

3. Wipe out the bottom of the cabinet if you need to, and line it with something wipeable or washable.  I used a bit of leftover oilcloth. In the past, I've used shelf liner or garbage bags.

4.  Put everything back.  Don't fill up the whole space if you don't need to. It's okay to have empty space in your house. You'll probably fill it up, anyway, next time you go to Costco and buy a six-pack of wipes or something.

Here's the "after" pic:

This did actually take me seven minutes. :) But close enough.

(If you missed numbers 1 through 13 in this series, they can be found by clicking on the "organization" category in the sidebar at right.)