What do you do when the basement is the coolest place in the house during hot and humid afternoons? Clean up the laundry pantry of course!
Our house is about 81 and very humid right now. We don’t have central air conditioning, and the window air conditioners have not yet been installed. Actually, I’ve never lived anywhere for more than a few months with central air conditioning, so I tell myself that I don’t know what I am missing.
Still, no one wants to be hot, so my four-year-old and I headed down to the finished basement to stay cool. While he plays with the toys down there, I figured I could cheat a little on my allotted cleaning time by organizing the laundry pantry, or in my case, a bunch of metal shelves in the laundry room.
Because I keep a stockpile of items when I can match a sale and a coupon, things tend to get a but messy. Plus, I have a bunch of samples thrown carelessly on the shelves. I also have a variety of laundry products for different uses, from pre-treaters to cold water detergent.
By tackling the laundry pantry, I was able to consolidate and organize everything. It helped me see what I have, see what I don’t need, and prioritize the use of my laundry items. For example, when faced with two opened bottles of the same product, I poured one into the other and eliminated the clutter of one of the bottles.
To get started, I hung a plastic bag for garbage, grabbed some paper towels and cloth towels for cleaning. I had a table nearby for sorting. Then I removed everything, one shelf at a time and grouped the items by usage, and placed the ones I wanted to use up first near the front.
A quick clean of the shelves and any dusty containers, and everything went back on, organized and neat. I reduced the number of shelves I needed from three to two, just by being organized.The task It went so quickly that I know need another cleaning excuse to stay cool and I wondered why I put it off for so long.
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