Pancakes & French Fries

These pictures don’t come close to showing what we accomplished this week. I also redid the bedding in our master bedroom and bought new curtains. I’m in the middle of working on a homework station for the boys and putting together their supplies for next year. I’ll blog about those projects when they’re done. I plan to finish them soon because the house looks chaotic thanks to in-process projects and bags of items to donate!

We cleaned out the boys’ closet. Now we need to organize it and buy more hangers. We also need a second dresser, but I won’t tackle that until I finish purging what’s in the dresser they already have. Maybe we won’t need a new dresser!

Nico thinned out his stuffed animal hoard by half. The rule is that he can’t have stuffed animals on the floor. Well, clever Nico started stuffing them between the wall and his cabinet once his animal bin couldn’t hold anymore. “Mom, you said stuffed animals can’t be on the floor. They aren’t on the floor! They’re IN THE AIR!” Nice try, sly guy.

I went through my shoes and got rid of 12 pairs. I feel like I can get rid of two more pairs, but I’m going to wait and see if they see any use this winter. I’m tackling my closet next, then my dresser.

I start back at work next week! Prayers that I adjust to the change would be most appreciated.

I’m not the only one who tackled a project this week! The boys went through their video game cabinet and got rid of all the games they no longer play. They took them GameStop and now have $75 in store credit!

When summer started, I decided that I would tackle the ‘me’ projects right before school resumed so that my school year started off fresh. ‘Me’ projects include my makeup drawer, my bathroom, my medicine cabinet, and my closet. I worked on my makeup drawer this week, which was a weird project. Most of my makeup wasn’t actually in my makeup drawer. We travelled a couple of times this year and my makeup never made it back to the drawer. Instead, it housed dozens of makeup samples, powder dust, infrequently used brushes, and a lot of expired makeup.

I tossed out quite a bit, though it’s hard to tell from the pictures since all my makeup was scattered around the bathroom. I tried to limit it to the basics, but did keep all 200 of my tweezers despite knowing the boys will only use the newest, sharpest set on complicated Lego builds. I have two foundations (one full coverage, one a tinted moisturizer), two blushes (one cream, one powder), two primers (one sparkly, one matte), two mascaras (one lengthening, one thickening), and four lip colors (two glosses, two lipsticks). My makeup drawer is the Noah’s Ark of cosmetics.

School is right around the corner and I’m starting to feel the end of summer blues. Anyone else?

 

You can tell when I started working/volunteering in the library full time just by the dates on my spices. All the spices expired around the same time–shortly after I started working/volunteering full time–and that time is also when I stopped cooking/baking regularly. You learn so much about yourself when you clean out your cupboards! This is why I keep decluttering after all these years–I’d rather learn about myself than have others make assumptions after I’m gone.

The good news is that I’ve made a solid effort to reduce how much time I’m devoting to work outside the home. My schedule next year will be lighter, so much so that I plan to continue posting projects on Thursdays even after the school year begins.

I’ve also made an effort to use up all the food in the pantry, fridge, and freezer. Not every dinner has been spectacular–one night we had raviolis, vegan chicken tenders, and one eggplant cutlet each–but it’s hardly worth complaining about. Most of what I’ve made has been pretty great and greatly appreciated. I made the Oatmeal Clafoutis Rachel recommended in the comments of this post using the dried apricots, white chocolate chips, and pumpkin seeds I found buried in the pantry. Everyone loved it! I’m going to make another batch soon and freeze them in individual portions for school breakfasts.

I’ve also decreased my screen time! I figured out last week that the Moment app tracked my use of apps like Google Maps and that it logged as screen time any time I didn’t lock my phone. I never lock my phone; I let it go to sleep naturally. That made me feel a little bit better about my screen time numbers, but I still did two things that helped enormously.

1. I took Instagram off my phone. Now when I want to post, I have to download the app, set it up, and then take the app off my phone when I’m done. I’m more selective about what I post, as you can imagine, and my time spent in the blackhole they call Explore is nonexistent.
2. I’m reading “real” books almost exclusively. It makes it harder for me to “take a break” and check social media when I’m holding a paper book. Bonus: it won’t kill my soul and it might make me smarter in the long run.

I’ve really enjoyed myself this summer. I’ve taken it easy and haven’t done much of anything. I’ve stuck to my decluttering/writing schedule. I could be walking more, and I’ll work on that, but overall I think I’m moving in the right direction.

Writing these posts is a mixed bag. I like the cleaning, the organizing, and the sense of accomplishment I have when I finish. I enjoy writing the posts; I often discover something about myself or how we do things as a family as I write, and a lot of what I discover I use later to help in other areas of the house.

I hate stopping to take pictures. I hate editing the pictures, especially since most of them are a far cry from pretty. I really hate posting them in a public forum! Sometimes I can’t believe I’m posting embarrassing pictures of our house online for everyone to see. That doesn’t make sense, except it does. Posting on the blog keeps me on task and motivated. God knows it keeps me humble.

These pictures are worse than usual. Sorry about that!

The pantry is in a very small laundry room. I can’t take a full picture while standing in the room, so to take these pictures I had to stick my arm into the room and click blindly. These are the best of the bunch!

Where the pantry is now is where we believe once stood dryer or stacking washing machine and dryer. The wall where our washed and dryer sit now had a large window filling the entire top half of the wall. The previous owner removed it and enclosed the room to place their appliances underneath. We’ve toyed with returning everything to its original layout, but we’d likely lose out on pantry space. Pantry space we clearly don’t use properly.

I used the same technique to clean the pantry that I used to clean the refrigerator. I pulled everything out shelf by shelf. I tossed what was old or expired, donated what we weren’t ever going to use, and marveled at the random stuff on my baking shelf. There were ingredients there (corn syrup, crisco) that I don’t remember buying. I think the corn syrup was for a craft? Something to do with school? I have no idea. I kept it, though, because I don’t want to toss it until I remember why I bought it. I know it was school related, somehow. If I don’t remember soon, I’ll get rid of it. EDITED: I remember!! Nico used it to make a peanut butter-free bird feeder for Earth Day!

Happy Earth 🌏 Day! Nico made a bird feeder out of an empty toilet paper roll, homemade edible glue, and bird seed.

A post shared by Jules Kendall (@themrskendall) on Apr 22, 2017 at 6:10pm PDT

Here’s the after, and this is with me making no effort to organize anything. I did transfer opened grains into canning jars for reasons not tied to aesthetics. The boys don’t always close up their cereal and cracker boxes properly, and about two months ago we had a grain moth infestation as a result. We just can’t keep opened bags of grain or seed in the house without attracting the critters. No amount of chip clips have helped! I opened a tightly closed canister of bread crumbs and inside were moths! They flew out at me like Progresso’s Pandora’s Box! Screw top lids from now on. Period. Just yesterday I transferred all the rice into that big jar on the second to last shelf.

I always get comments on how little stuff we have in our pantry. We have food; promise! It’s just not snack food/packaged food, and most of our grains I keep stored in a grain pantry. I store the flour in a fridge in the garage and spices in a spice cabinet. We mainly eat grilled or roasted meats and vegetables (no meat for Nico), so most of what we consume is stored elsewhere.

I just devoted a paragraph to justify the contents of my pantry. Blogging is weird.

I was able to make some pretty random items using what I found buried in the pantry. I made a huge pot of pinto beans that the boys declared were “the best ever” using this recipe. I also made a tray of flax crackers using an unopened bag of flax meal I found. Those weren’t as great. I’m going to clean up the grain cabinet (pictured above) and the spice cabinet (not pictured). Maybe I’ll make granola bars or cookies with all the oats I found.