kitchen.

We started in the kitchen. Well, we started together in the kitchen. (Full disclosure: I was so elated by my discovery of The Minimalists that I sent their site to my husband during the work day, and arrived home to discover that he's already filled a huge "go away" bag with old clothes. As usual, my husband is a far better person than I could ever hope to be.)

But back to the kitchen. We started with the kitchen, and the adjoining mudroom area, because they struck us as the most cluttered. Neither of us are naughty cluttered by nature, but we agreed that we had allowed these areas of our home veer dangerously close to our definition of entropy. And so, we began to minimize.

Our mudroom contains four small, wooden shelves. For the past year, these shelves have been scattered with a random jumble of tools, cat-related supplies, paper goods, and various household odds and ends. As we began to minimize our clutter, the majority of it went into the trash, and much of the rest neatly fit into a toolbox. The result? Three newly empty shelves, which we ultimately re-purposed to hold necessities such as paper towels, Kleenex, and toilet paper. It was a quick and easy job, but the buzz was exhilarating. We were ready to tackle the kitchen.

Preface: We are foodie vegetarians, and we enjoy cooking. Thus, what we consider to be "necessities" are very likely not what other people would call "necessities." For example, I own a nut milk bag for making homemade almond milk, and I actually use it. Yes, it really is called a "nut milk bag." Shut up.

We started by taking inventory. Every item in the kitchen was subject to two considerations: value and enough. We concluded that our Vitamix has high value, since we use it every day. But many other kitchen gadgets suddenly seemed like extras. "We don't need a food processor; we can do it in the Vitamix!" And so on and so on. We kept a few pots and pans, our most-used utensils and gadgets, a few, choice cookbooks...and let the rest go. By the time we got to my bakeware stash -- the massive inventory of a woman who once ran a bakery out of her home -- I was on cruise control. Two over-stuffed double cabinets of baking supplies were ultimately reduced to 2 jellyroll pans that double as cookie sheets, 1 sheetcake pan, one set of round cake pans, a pie plate, a springform pan, a silpat, a brownie pan, a casserole dish, and a muffin tin. That sounds like a lot, I know. But for someone who bakes as much as I do, it's incredibly minimal. Perhaps someday I'll be done with baking altogether, but for now, this is where I'm at.

End result: 8 large bags filled with kitchen supplies -- donated! 2 large garbage bags went out with the trash/recycling. And, for the first time ever, our tupperware cabinet is organized...probably because we only kept a few small containers.

Without all the clutter, our kitchen felt newly peaceful and newly us. And we quickly discovered that minimizing one room makes you impatient to minimize them all.