New Years Organising Revolution - Week 2

This post is part of an organising contest that I'm participating in through I'm an Organizing Junkie.  Please vote for me from Friday - it's the one labelled "39 Trifectagirl". Thank you!!

I missed week one.  I'd planned to work on my desk, but that just got a bit too much last week.

This week the challenge area is the kitchen, so I chose to organise my utensils drawer.   I had sorted through my counter-top caddies just after the kitchen renovations, but not tackled the drawer yet.

I've had a pretty good double decker drawer divider/utensil holder for a number of years, so organising in this case was simply a case of 'empty, purge and allocate a home for what's left'.

My starting point was this jumbled hodge-podge mess. 

J loves pulling things out of this drawer, so I had already removed most of the knives (but I happened to find a few I'd forgotten about at the bottom of the pile).  I found multiple citrus zesters, pizza cutters, items I have no idea what they are, a chestnut cracker and 3 carving forks over and above my grandmother's good set.

I grouped things together, such as salad servers, useful but not used often (on the bottom rack!), skewers, spatulas and measuring spoons and long or chunky items. 

 

The top layer is things like can openers, garlic press, microplane and peelers.  Since finishing this and cooking a meal, I've done a bit of tweaking putting the microplane to the side and the nutmeg/ginger grater fits at the front of the divider.

 

 

I've decided I need to get one of these dividers from my cutlery drawer.  I'm using the moulded one that came with the kitchen, and realised tonight after doing this sort out that there is a bunch of wasted space in the existing set-up.

In the drawer I worked on, and my top one, I found a bunch of tea and hot chocolate items, so I bundled them together and have stored them in a glass mug with the tea and teapots. 

One thing I stumbled on in the drawer was a tea-bag squeezer, which I had forgotten I had.  I've stored this in the jar of teabags that sit on a lazy susan on my bench with the rest of my every-day coffee/tea making things.

This was a pretty quick project - if I'd not also done 2 loads of laundry and folded them, I'd have achieved the sort and this post while J was doing this: