Day 17 of the Decluttering Challenge: Your Kitchen Pantry
For day seventeen of the 30 Day Decluttering Challenge, we are marching right in to our kitchen pantry.
You might be like me, and your pantry may actually be just a kitchen cabinet where you keep your food.
In my mind, this was going to be a big day for us. I know for a fact that most kitchen pantries could use a thorough decluttering day.
But my mind could never know all the sleep deprivation and urgent care visits this week had in store for my household.
Don’t worry. We are all okay. My son is on meds for a sinus infection now, and last night he was able to go to sleep easily for the first time all week.
Sleep is a gangster of an individual to borrow from. The first day you miss some sleep, you might not notice. The second day, you may drag a bit, but you can still accomplish things. After several days though, that missed sleep adds up, and you are no longer in control of the situation.
Sleep will show up and take you down, incapacitating you until you have paid that sleep debt back. By Friday, that is where I was. I was literally incapable of doing fifteen minutes of a pantry declutter.
I hope that doesn’t happen to you! But there will definitely be days when decluttering won’t happen.
Please never feel bad about falling behind on this. Just jump right back with us when you can. Pick up where you left off, or join us where we are. Do what you choose, but don’t give up on decluttering. I feel like everyone could benefit from this, even if it’s just your kids benefitting when you pass and they have to clean out your house.
What to Look for When Decluttering Your Pantry:
Usually, any given pantry has expired foods. When I decluttered my pantry before this last move, I checked expired foods by tasting them. Y’all, yuck. I only did that for a couple of boxes before I realized that all expired foods taste like stale cardboard. After that, anything expired went straight into the trash can.
Another biggie is the little bitty crumb remains of bags and boxes of crackers and chips and things. Those are usually stale too, so you can file those straight into the trash can as well.
The hardest thing to me is the boxes of unopened, perfectly good foods that no one in the house wants to eat. They aren’t expired, but eventually they will be. I try to feed them to my kids’ friends. A couple of weeks ago I bagged up all the individually wrapped snacks no one will eat and gave them to my son’s teacher for kids who forget to bring their snack.
Sometimes I will have a friend who will take our uneaten granola bars off my hands. I just hate to throw away good food, you know?
Then of course you have random kitchen gadgets you never use, and that is a judgment call for what you dearly want and what you realize you can live without.
So without further ado, here is my day seventeen video.
I felt scattered, and I looked scattered and distracted. But we got five minutes in anyway!
And, as usual, I’m including the thirty day decluttering printable list below:
I made a home for the videos of every single day of the challenge over on YouTube.
It is called the 30 Day Decluttering Challenge playlist, and you can click here to see the whole thing.
I hope you will join me back here on Monday for day eighteen of the challenge. We will be decluttering our linen closets for ten minutes.
Happy decluttering! Thanks for joining us!
