Today it’s another small step–and one that I have tackled before–the overflowing cabinet of storage containers… and the deep-reach cave of kitchen cooking weirdness.

I am always spilling out plastic storage containers onto the floor every time I go digging for the “right” one. The truth is: I just have way too many plastic tubs. How do I know? Because I’ve tried getting rid of bunches in the past, but I still seem to have stacks upon stacks.

When I look at this picture, and think about how this cabinet looks on most days, I’d have to say that it doesn’t look that bad. What you can’t tell, though, by looking at this picture is that I doubt I could take out even a single container without triggering a major avalanche of “convenient” plastic tubs all over the floor.

So I tossed another big stack tonight; they are now sitting in a bag in the basement, waiting for recycling day. All in all, I tossed 21 containers and 17 lids. I’m sure I could have cut down even more…since the fridge is packed with filled containers already. But that will have to be good enough for tonight.

There’s some lesson in all of this, I’m sure–something about my archival impulse, or my misplaced sense of frugality, or economy…. or something like that.

But it’s a little too late on a Monday night to draw out all of the implications of my regenerating mountain of storage containers and the difficulty I seem to have in tossing them in the recycling bin instead of storing them for future use. For now, I am happy with having taken this simple action, and along with it, making a simple commitment to keep my stockpile to a minimum.

And that deep-reach cave of kitchen cooking weirdness? The layout of this particular kitchen cabinet creates a space that is just about unusable–you need to be on your hands and knees with your head  jammed in the cabinet just to reach anything (and without a flashlight, you are basically digging around in the dark). As a result, this “cave” has become the resting ground for all sorts of bizarre, underused kitchen items. Some of these I chucked, the rest I stored on the shelves leading into the basement. The few things I left in this space are now easy to reach items that have been in use within the last month or two (a meatloaf pan and some muffin tins, to be precise).

And speaking of excavating–those stairs down to the basement, and the basement itself, are an entirely other matter; clearing those spaces is going to be a major excavation!