This week’s sidequests included putting the phone away and spending an hour with no internet, getting a houseplant, and organizing the kitchen.

There is a houseplant card for each deck, so this is the first one I’ll be getting this year. I don’t expect it to live long – they never do with me. Which is too bad, because I love hydrangeas.

Either the cat will knock it over or it will just die, despite any care I give it. We’ll see what happens first.

Spending an hour with no internet was easy – I have been reading more after all, so like all the similar challenges of that sort, I sat down and read for awhile today.

Organizing the kitchen was a little harder because I’m not a super disorganized person except for my storage areas. So the kitchen itself looks fine at a glance – until you open the cupboards. My problem areas are tupperware (but let’s face it, no one tames that) and the pots and pans and baking sheets.

This is the before picture. The thing that always bugged me a bit was that choosing a frying pan is a bit hard because they’re stacked on top of each other. The baking sheets are also kind of cluster-fucky.

So I went out and got these. In retrospect, I probably should have just gotten custom cut wood from a hardware store, because pulling apart the wood was a bit annoying, and I did have to cut down one slat to fit in the space. But I was working off of a basic concept and didn’t even know if I’d like it, so we’ll consider this early test phase. The result looks something like this:

The little wire pan organizer was really easy to put together, and did a great job. It fits the larger pans fine – I might get a second one to organize the smaller pans as well.

The little wood panels also worked great as a concept. Some things I will consider when I make a nicer one eventually: better wood is a must, and perhaps glue the panels down first before securing tightly with nails to ensure more evenness. It’ll do the job for now though. I also have the other side with baking dishes that are all glass (casserole, pie, bread dishes) and the accursed plastic container hell that needs to be organized, but those might need more creativity.