Make Mine Neat

I’m a slob.

I don’t make a secret of it and am not proud of it. Due to physical limitations I have to ration my spoons, so when I have to get up to toss something or to clean up in general… I make it count. One trip for everything, much as humanly possible. Which means stuff piles up before it gets cleaned up or tossed out.

At my core, though, I prefer borderline Spartan surroundings, in part due to my limitations. The less stuff in the house, the easier to manage.

Aaaaaaand I’m married to a pack rat. Not quite to hoarder level; definitely on the cusp.

Perversely, G likes all his crap in neat piles, so my circle of chaos drives him nuts, regardless of circumference.

His desk is perfectly tidy, as shown above. What this view doesn’t show is the tools stacked underneath and in other parts of the room.

Lest you think that’s an exaggeration:

All those boxes and such are in front of the closet door. Ideally it won’t stay stacked up for very long. Some weeks, though…

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Not all G’s neat-freak-hoarder tendences drive me batty. Our pantry always leans heavily toward “hot mess” territory. We clear out and organize a couple of times a year. Within a few weeks of a cleanout, though, it’s back to teetering on the edge of a stuff-alanche.

We’ve done some mitigation. Contents of bags and pouches have been transferred to glass jars, reducing the risk of spillage. Bonus points because glass containment also makes them less vulnerable to critter incursions.

I have a rotating spice rack similar to the one at left, and I love it. Unfortunately, it only holds 20 bottles, which is short about 20 from what I need. We tried adding a second rack, which in theory would’ve solved the issue. However, the only place a second one could go would be behind the main one, and accessibility made it a no-go. (It has to go into the pantry because we have virtually zero remaining counter space.)

So we went back to Plan A-and-a-half, which was throwing as many excess spice bottles as would fit into a small basket, and letting the rest land wherever we could fit them.

G decided to go one better. Do you see that wooden thing of beauty at the top of the page?

It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the drawers are at a slight tilt forward. The pantry furniture was G’s solution. He custom-built an organizer which will just fit into the space between shelves in the pantry. In fact, he built two of them. The lower two drawers will hold canned goods; the top drawer was made a bit shallower to handle the overflow of spices.

And unlike the pull-out spice drawers he built for the pantry in the tin box, these are portable, so we can take them with us when we move.

Yeeeeaaahh, baby!