Why I've been an absentee blogger as of late...

As many of you know, we are closing on a new house this Thursday, so I've been spending all my spare time packing anything and everything I can do without for a few weeks time in an effort to make our house look and tidy and big as possible.

I don't think I've ever cleaned so much in my entire life! I've mopped, dusted, vacuumed, washed, rearranged, boxed up, scoured, scrubbed, de-cluttered and just about any other cleaning type word you can think of. I even scrubbed my lazy susan with toothbrush! And let me just say, I'm pooped!

And it's not over since I have to keep the house ready for a showing at a moments notice, and Melanie is bound and determined to not make that an easy task for me. But we will survive, possibly even become better for the experience. Here are a few shots of when I worked on the kitchen last week.

The "stuff" I cleared out of the kitchen drawers that I felt I could do without for a few weeks...

... and all the "stuff" I still "needed"!
We'll see how much of it I actually use in the coming weeks :)

I was amazed at how many spices I had been able to fit onto one shelf!
I packed some of the ones I don't use as often away in a box to make the cabinets look bigger, only to have to open the box the next day to find one I needed :P

My lovely assistant.
She especially liked playing with the mortar and pestle.

This box is entirely reusable plastic containers!
I don't think I'll be buying any more of these for a while!
(in my defense, I bought a lot of them to have on hand for when I make meals for friends that have had babies, with the idea that then they won't have to get any serving stuff back to me. Yet they give it back anyway, thus my over abundance of plastic storage containers!)

The storage containers I kept

So empty...

My gadget cabinet is looking rather bare compared to how packed it usually is!

And a couple boxes of all the non-essentials.

And finally, my china that I didn't even finish unwrapping from our wedding!
It's been living in the front hall closet for four years.
Maybe it will actually get to see the light of day in our new house. Or if it's really lucky, we might even eat off of it!

After all this cleaning, I've put Matt on notice that once we're moved into the new house I may be going on a cleaning strike for a while. After I've let everyone come over and tour our fabulous new home, that is. So don't ask to come over during the month of September/October. I won't pick up for you.