If you live with children or even small animals, keeping your home clean can almost seem like an impossible task at times. However, by staying organized and practicing a few tricks of the trade, keeping your house neat and tidy isn t as difficult or as impossible as it seems.
Whether you live in a 2,000 square foot house or a 500 square foot apartment, the key to keeping any living space livable is knowing how to stay organized. Keeping this in mind, most of us are not natural born neat freaks. However, there are plenty of stores such as Bed, Bath and Beyond as well as TJ Max, Target and others to help us out along the way. For starters, ask yourself what your kitchen pantry looks like. Is there a method to the madness, or is there just madness? Who has access to your pantry? Do you allow your kids to play in there, or do you perhaps leave it open at times so that Fluffy can have a sniff around at what might be tasty? Limit access to your pantry and then do a little reorganizing. Start by going through all of the items in your pantry and getting rid of whatever is expired. If there are things in your pantry that you know you are simply never going to eat but then again, they aren t expired either, then set them aside so that you can donate them.
The next thing that you will want to do is invest in a label maker and/or purchase a few clear, air tight containers. Air tight containers are great for storing loose items such as bags of pasta that have been opened, cereal, flour, sugars and spice and other miscellaneous items such as cookies and/or candy. They also happen to look a lot neater in a container than they do crumpled up in a bag that is shoved in the corner. Not only this, but clear containers allow you to see what is inside of them, thereby encouraging you to use them (versus letting them sit around and expire because you are too lazy to dig through the bag to figure it out!).
Once you ve figured out how to straighten up your kitchen pantry, focus on your actual kitchen. When you look around your kitchen, are there a lot of items sitting out on the counter? If you have small children or even animals, you should avoid putting anything on the counter tops because it just increases the likelihood that it will get sniffed, licked, dropped or touched in some way. Especially if you own a cat, cats naturally like to be in high places and will not hesitate to jump onto a counter top when you are not around, and the last thing that you want Fluffy doing is nestling up next to those freshly baked cookies that you made a few hours ago. If you must leave things out, make sure that they are in a protective air tight sealed container.