Week #5 Organized Home Challenge: Organizing Recipes and Cookbooks plus an update on last week’s challenge

I have mixed emotions about week 5 of Home Storage Solutions 101’s Organized Home Challenge.  We are still working in the kitchen: organize recipes and cookbooks.  I have all the tools I need to organize my recipes so I’ve been looking forward to addressing this area of my kitchen for ages.  However, I have hundreds of recipes to organize and a gazillion cookbooks I can’t seem to get rid of (I’ve tried.  Really, I’ve tried to donate half of them, but ended up donating 2).  I’m starting to sweat already.

This week’s challenge talks about the “fantasy recipe” category: all those recipes I’ve torn out of magazines or printed from websites that I’ll likely never even try.  Boo.  I like to think I will test them out and I keep stuffing them in a binder.  I guess I need to face reality during the challenge and toss most of them.

In the spirit of remaining in denial about the state of my recipes and cookbooks, let’s focus on last week’s challenge for a moment.   I’ll get back to this week after lunch.  Yes, give me until lunchtime, please.

I completely disassembled the refrigerator and scrubbed it all down.  Ah.  It felt great.  I was pretty gung-ho about getting to this task and I forgot to take a before picture.  Let me just say it was packed.

And here is the fridge after.  It is a little deceiving because this is before another trip to the store.

Here is the jam-packed fridge door before the purging commenced.

And here is the fridge door after.

 The fridge door is still filled, but I actually use everything there.  The same goes with our fridge drawers.  I buy a lot of fruits and veggies each week so those drawers are never empty, but everything is fresh and clean and ready to go.  Having it organized not only helps me feel better, but it makes menu planning and STICKING with my menu plan much easier.

Notice there are no pics of my freezer?  Ugh.  That darn freezer.  I wanted to organize it desperately.  Except it has some issues and if I open it for more than 2.5 seconds the temperature rises quickly.  So I decided to wait on the freezer until we figure out what’s up with it.  A Google search told me that my motherboard is down, will continue to have issues even if I replace it, and I will likely have to just buy a new fridge/freezer.  I don’t want to talk about it.

How about you all?  How goes the weekly challenges for you?