Day Zero Project: Reorganise cupboards

These are actually two separate tasks on my Day Zero Project list, but I’m lumped them together here for the purpose of talking about them. After all, there’s only so much you can say about a cupboard.

Our cottage is a little bit like a TARDIS. From the outside it looks quite small, like a traditional children’s picture of a cottage, there’s a door with a window on either side and a grey sloping roof. From the side you can see that it goes back a bit further than might be expected, but it still doesn’t look quite as big from the outside as it feels from the inside.

We’ve got a living room, kitchen and bedroom downstairs as well as a front and back lobby. Upstairs is a small bathroom and another bedroom. The upstairs rooms feel a wee bit smaller than they actually are owing to the sloped ceilings up there. The upstairs bedroom is the same size as our living room but at either end of the room the walls are only a foot high! We also have a walk-in cupboard downstairs and a crouch-in (due to the sloped ceiling) cupboard upstairs.

What surprised me about the house when we moved in was the cupboard space. Where we’d lived before we basically had two rooms, with no storage space to speak of, so having two whole cupboards as well as a spare bedroom was a luxury. We started off using the spare bedroom as a general dumping ground and then gradually sorted things out into the cupboards both upstairs and downstairs.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much reason to this sorting and things didn’t always end up in the most logical of places. Sure, it made sense to have all my Lord of the Rings figurines right at the very back upstairs since I’m not likely to need them very often. What made less sense was having all my knitting stuff upstairs when I do all of my knitting downstairs. We also had loads of boxes of CDs in the downstairs cupboards which meant that when we wanted to get one out you had to lift all of the boxes out to find the one you wanted. It just wasn’t practical.

What I hadn’t realised when I made the Day Zero Project list was just how much reorganising of other rooms would need to be done in order to reorganise the cupboards. We couldn’t move the CD boxes out of the downstairs cupboard until we got rid of our old bed and had one we could store boxes under. I couldn’t move my boxes of books neatly into the cupboard upstairs until I had moved my knitting stuff downstairs, which in turn couldn’t be done until we’d found a better way to store the empty rat cage.

So after playing a lot of musical cupboards and, my other personal favourite, cupboard Tetris, everything got stowed away and organised. It’s an ongoing challenge though, only two months ago I bought a new suitcase which needs to be homed in the cupboard upstairs. It fits and in fact it makes things even neater because we can keep other stuff inside it.

It’s a little bit sad but I do quite enjoy playing with my cupboards. Nothing makes me happier than looking at what needs to go where and reorganising things in the most practical way. It’s a little bit sad, but I think it’s a grown up thing.