You Know It’s A New Year When . . .

this Dragonfly attacks her kitchen with reckless abandon. 

This is my dining room table after I gutted the kitchen and committed to getting rid of anything that was damaged, hadn’t been used or was missing the rest of its family. An inventory of the madness, if you will:

1. Plastic IKEA plates that are 7 years old and have weird baked-in, washed-in, never-coming-off grime on them. Oh, and a cutting board that is melted on one half.

2. Random cake pans that take up an enormous amount of space and have never been used.  Anybody want a brand spankin’ new Williams-Sonoma train cake pan?  Email me.

3. Jell-o molds I once bought at a garage sale thinking, “I’ll make beautiful ice rings out of them to put in punch.”  Problem is, I don’t own a punch bowl.  And people don’t really drink punch anymore.

4.  Six stemware glasses.  They are a close match to my crystal stemware, but have sat above the microwave for seven years collecting dust.  Buh-bye.

5. A collection of mismatched mugs.  The Queen gave me a set of white matching mugs this year, so these seem superfluous.

6. The sad remnants of three sets of drinking glasses – their siblings destroyed in one way or another by my children.

7. Random bowls.  I could keep them if I didn’t have twenty other bowls that I actually use.

8. Cute ice cream dishes.  These were a garage sale find.  I do like them.  The kids think they are awesome.  But we just haven’t used them.  There are six of us who love ice cream and only four dishes.  Want? Let me know.

9. Tea cups.  I love and use the plates that go with this set all the time.  But we are not tea drinkers. And tea cups are cumbersome to store.  There are eight of them. Up for grabs!

10. Saucers and mini loaf pans. Don’t use. Don’t need.  Amen.

11. Random yellow dishes.  The pasta bowls are from Pottery barn.  We’ve graduated to a set with six bowls. The other dishes are mismatched leftovers.

12. Snowflake bowls. These go with the set of dishes I like to pull out for everyday use at Christmas time.  I have never seen bowls this huge.  They’d take a half a box of cereal to fill.  You could use them for soup for two! I don’t know what do to with them. So I’m sayin’ sayonara sweetie.

I cannot tell you how liberating it was to clean the kitchen in this way.  I scrubbed down shelves and reorganized them with all the new space I’d created.  I vacuumed the toaster crumbs up.  I wiped off fingerprints and grime from the little people.

And now I’m going to move on to the dining room.  I will attack every room in this house until I have rid myself of the things I hang onto but do not use or need.  There are people out there who can use these things and do need them.

And seriously – If you live in my area and want ANY of these things before I take them to GoodWill, just give me a shout out {extra photos to entice you?}