Day #5: Under the Kitchen Sink

I've got everything under here but the... kitchen sink. Ba dum bum! (Thanks, folks. I'll be here all week.)

Seriously though, I stuff more things under this sink than I do in the linen closet. I hardly look at it down here because it has water damage and needs to be fixed and well, it's just easier to close the doors.

Along with the usual cleansers, trash bags and the like, this seems to be a vase graveyard and paper-of-all-kinds storage. Or a rat's nest. Not sure which.

To the left, behind the other cupboards:

Yikes!

Who knows what could have been hiding back there!

A family of mice?

A dead body?

The Lindberg baby?

I took everything out and threw away a lot of old cleansers bottles, old sponges and SOS pads, and used some of the paper bags to line the bottom until I can get some proper contact paper.

Unfortunately, there is still a bunch of stuff under the sink that can't be moved, like the garbage disposal, a water purifier and a water heater for the purified water. It all takes up a lot of space, but I'm sure I'd just fill that space with more crap, so I'll work with what I have.

Zoe inspected as usual. I swear, she hops into every cupboard or shelf that she can!

Again, I forgot to take a picture of all the stuff I pulled out, but it was pretty ugly.

At first glance, it might not look like I cleaned out that much, but I really did toss a lot and was able to corral the remaining cleaners and trash bags to containers and nothing is overflowing. (BTW, all the boys are old enough that we don't have to worry about them getting into chemicals. In fact, they stay as far away as they can from anything that is used to clean.)

I ended up switching out one of the baskets for an old Tupperware container that had been missing a lid, and I also moved the dish sponges with the other sponges in the back (I sealed them in one of the old drapery bags from the linen closet to keep them from coming in contact with sponges used for more heavy duty cleaning.)

Eventually I'd like to get different containers, ones that hide the contents a bit better. But right now I'm working with what I have (that's an old Clorox bottle on the left), and it's nice to not have spent a dime yet on this challenge. Also, I end up having to tweak stuff a lot, and I'd rather find out if containers aren't going to work down here first before I go and spend a lot of money.

This didn't even take as long as I thought it would. Originally, I was thinking, "Thank goodness we're having leftovers for dinner because this is going to take forever," but it actually only took about half an hour. And that included deep scrubbing all over.

So far, so good. On to the next one!