THE EMPLOYABLE MOM: Top o' the Fridge to Ya: how a little project can make a big difference!

I hope I'm not the only person this happens to because I am slightly embarrassed, but yesterday I opened our freezer door and like three things fell on my head. It must have been a sign because I had been trying to decide what to organize for my February Action Item, since January's was a bust.

This little project was the perfect way for me to make a BIG difference, for two reasons.

#1 Organizing isn't about tackling a whole room, it's about taking each individual (small) space and creating a system for it. Organizing the kitchen could take forever and would be impossible to do during a nap but the top of the fridge is a perfect nap time project that produces immediate results and will encourage you to take on more little projects.

#2 I was tired of getting hit in the head.

Since having the baby the top of our fridge has been this enormous catch-all for the things we don't know where to put or don't want to leave out on the counters, which is why it looks like this:

First, I completely emptied the space and wiped it down, clean-slate style.

Then, I put everything I needed back onto the fridge, like the dog treats and the tray.

Next, I had to got through all of the piles of stuff I had pulled off the top o' the fridge.

I ended up taking everything and splitting it into three piles: keep, give, trash. For all the "keeps," I put them into some extra tuppers I had and labeled it. I used post-its to ID where all my "gives" were going. Trash...well, thats obv.

I managed to find some quite interesting specimens up there too: like an expired box of altoids, an antique garlic press and masher, a ton of old take-out silverware and chop sticks, and some sterling silver Onieda silverware from 1982 that was still in plastic bags (things my mom gives me as she cleans out her house.)