One Thing Leads to Another

 We sold our old kitchen table and chairs today on craiglist. I'm always glad when those sales go through. So I can say that getting that table out of our garage really opened up some room in there. My decluttering today started while I was waiting for the buyer of the table to stop by my house. I decided to go through a few things on my kitchen counter top. See yesterday's post for a wider view on what that looked like. I found these ponchos that were purchased for my daughter's Washington DC trip. Since they were not needed I decided to return them rather than keep them sitting around the house taking up space. What I needed to find was the receipt.

Looking for the receipt led me to my basement where I keep an envelope with each months receipts. I like to keep my receipts in an envelope for moments like this...when I need to find a receipt so I can return something and get my money back. I found the receipt in my March envelope, just as expected. Love when that happens. While I was down there I noticed three envelopes dated October, November and December. I pulled them out of the drawer recently as a reminder to shred those. Generally, most stores don't take returns after 90 days, thus when I decide to shred. Since I had time...I shredded the receipts in ALL three envelopes. Took less than 10 minutes. I have evidence below of my shredding.

The buyer still had not arrived. And at this point I was beginning to wonder if I had a no show on my hands! I decided to peek into that drawer under the stove. This is what I found:

What you can't tell from the picture is there are two baking pans, which are very dark, that I never use at the bottom. In fact, I inherited said pans when we moved into our last house. They were left behind. I thought I was lucky at the time. I don't think that now. Just more clutter! And I moved it with us to this house. That is crazy. 

I pulled all the pans out. Then the entire drawer which I wiped clean. There were crumbs in there from as far back as July 2012, which is when we moved into this house. I also needed to sweep under the stove. You will be glad I didn't take a picture, because there were more crumbs and a whole pretzel under there. The clean drawer was replaced and the pans I use and wanted to keep were returned neatly. The finished product doesn't look a lot different, but it IS better. 

It feels good to get a few things done everyday. I doubt anyone in my family will notice this clean drawer, fewer receipts or the extra $5 back in our pocket from my efforts today.

 But I know and I feel good about it!!