Organizing on my vacation

My mother was so excited to have me at their house for a week because she knew I'd be dying to help out around the house! I must say, if all the houses I worked on in MA were already as organized as my mom's, I'd have nothing to do! But there were a couple of small areas that we worked on.

The first was her kitchen cabinets. It's just her and my dad living there now, so when I asked her about sets of dishes she had upstairs in the kitchen and got answers like "oh those...I use them once a year when I have book club at my house", we moved those things out of the MAIN zone and into the STORAGE zone (i.e. shelves in the basement!) Then we thinned out the existing dishes, glasses, etc. This is one of the things I picked up at Target to give her more space in her primary dish cabinet:


It's what most of us probably need, right? For just $5 (or so) you can easily create more space. My mom had cereal bowls stacked on top of small salad plates and was having to move them each time we wanted to unload the dishwasher. No longer!

Her favorite thing we did was thin out the pantry a little (my relocating hardly-ever-used kitchen appliances to the basement) and then stacking up the canned goods on risers like these:

Fabulous, right? And just $8 at Target. We were able to get 3 and outfit the whole pantry!