Years ago, I did a ruthless declutter of my sewing room. Even so, every year when I deep clean—not just dusting and vacuuming, but opening every basket, drawer, and shelf—I still manage to find a stray item or two ready for donation.

Both my pantry and freezer need a good cleaning. They’re unorganized and jumbled, and despite my best intentions, I’ve simply let them both go.

I know myself well enough to know that I can’t even begin to clean either one until I use up much of the food I’ve been storing. So before the hectic holiday season begins, I’m going to challenge myself to eat mainly out of my pantry and freezer—use it up, create some space, and enjoy the bonus of making Zero Dollar Dinners along the way.

After the challenge, I can give everything a good scrub. But October is going to be for cooking and eating what I already have, not for shopping. Want to do it with me? Please say yes! Read on to see how we’ll do it.

The Zero Dollar Dinner Challenge

Let’s start October 1st and plan our meals with the intention of making Zero Dollar Dinners—also known as Pantry Clean-Out Dinners—for all our dinners, and go as deep into the month as we can. I’ve done this for a week before, but this is the first time I’ve tried it for a full month.

We’ll give ourselves a pass to shop for anything needed to complete a pantry or freezer dinner. For example, I have two cans of chopped clams, but to make chowder I’ll need to buy potatoes, clam juice, and half-and-half. Of course, I’ll still need to buy basics like apples, lettuce, and milk—but shopping for anything that goes into the pantry or freezer is off-limits.

The goal is to use what we already have before freezer burn or expiration dates force us to throw food away—something I really hate doing.

The Key: Meal Planning

The key to this challenge is meal planning. Start by assessing what you have and creating a dinner list. I’ve already done this and came up with about a dozen dinner ideas to get us started:

• Canned clams → clam chowder

• Canned salmon → salmon patties

• A slice of ham from the freezer → lentil soup (two nights!)

• A single frozen steak → broiled and sliced for steak salad for two

• Frozen brats → an easy sheet-pan dinner (perfect for busy days)

I also discovered three boxes of muffin mix I bought with grand plans to bake when my grandson was here… and never did. October will be the month we finally make those muffins.

And then there are the little European sauce packets I picked up on a recent trip to World Market. I’d be embarrassed to show you how many there are. What was I thinking? My bad—and now I need to figure out how to use them. This could make for some interesting dinners.

Join Me?

I hope this strikes a chord with you. Let’s make some interesting Zero Dollar Dinners together! I’m pretty excited about this—especially if you do it with me.

I haven’t explained this plan to my husband yet, but I know he’ll get on board once I tell him my reasons… especially if he thinks we’ll be saving some money.

And don't forget Crazy Soup! My most recent concoction ended up being southwest in flavor and was a real hit! Mostly made from a frozen container of sliced tomatoes and summer squash and something else I didn't recognize or remember--I whirred it together with stock, then added salsa, corn from two cobs, ground sausage and then topped with crushed tortilla chips and snipped chives, all leftovers. I usually make a salad but this week I had leftover bread and I always have cheese, so cheesy bread made a nice compliment.

I know so many of you come here for the knitting and I do have several knitting posts planned for the future. I have 3 test knits either finished or close to it, but I can't share until the patterns are published. Sit tight for knitting content--it's coming!

Please scroll down to leave a comment. I love to hear from you anytime, but especially interested in knowing if you are going to join me in October. Just imagine how wonderful it will be to face the holidays with a clean pantry and freezer, and just how nice it will be to save some money. Send this to your friends, your mom, your aunt, let's do it together!

Photo source from the top of page: Lacademie

But back to my friends--with a time bomb ready to explode they hired help and were able to get through their entire house by their deadline. However, it was extremely stressful, so much so that my friend had to be hospitalized twice during the process. Moving is stressful enough no matter what, but there is something we can do now to make it easier, even if you don’t plan on moving for twenty years. So right now, if your house feels a bit too crowded, then don't wait until a move forces you to prune, prune now! If you begin that declutter journey right now you'll have years of enjoying the benefits of owning less (and I'm not talking about becoming a minimalist because I would hate that too) and profit from knowing that everything in your home is something you want and love and actually use.  And moving day, even if years from now, will be an easier venture.

I'm happy to tell you that my friends are happily nestled into their new home on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Life is definitely good for them, but she shudders when she recalls the moving experience and as an aside, my husband was overwhelmed by what they went through. I assured him that our moving story, whenever that happens, will be different, no doubt chaotic, but perhaps less so? Fingers crossed my friends. But right now I do know that I can open our drawers with no struggles, I see empty space in the cabinets, and when I open a closet, there is nothing falling onto my head. I'm not a declutter or organizing expert, just an ordinary person with the very first world problem of owning too much and not liking it. I'm pretty proud of what I was able to achieve during my declutter journey of the last few years. I took the slow but steady route and you can read about it in these posts:

I said goodbye to grandma’s china in this post.

I binge cleaned and then and tackled my paper clutter. 

I continued my cleaning binge, including sentimental items here.

My last binge cleaning post tackles the kitchen and includes great organizing and money saving tips.

Generations of photos and family memorabilia were also tackled.

How I'm nibbling away at my stash and making it more manageable. 

I decluttered my Christmas calendar and holiday chores so I could enjoy my holiday!

So you've decluttered? Here are some tips to help stop you from accumulating too much stuff again.

I also decluttered my digital life. Why I Gave Up Social Media, and I've never regretted it.

Sewing Room Tour with tips on how you can create your own creative space and keep it decluttered.

We couldn't let our friends go without a goodbye party. The pictures above are from our neighborhood going away party we threw in our backyard. Our neighborhood parties are always casual, always potluck, often last minute, and always very fun. We don't organize the food or drink and it always works out, but as with any typical potluck, we bring whatever we like to drink, plus more to share, plus a dish to share. The host supplies the plates and cups, and this neighborhood expects paper and plastic. We had a beet salad, an Indian rice dish, chicken kebabs, meatballs, cucumber salad, brownies, and so much more. It was quite a smorgasbord. Someone brought chips and onion dip and it was devoured! We were all exclaiming about how we never have chips and onion dip anymore and why not? It's so good! We had an exchange student from Italy at our party and he might have thought our food selection was a bit alarming but I know he had fun. When visiting another country it's so fun to see how the natives party, don't you think? 😉 I put out nuts and a bowl of cherry tomatoes and made tomato bruschetta that was gone in a flash. I also made flower arrangements for each table of course. I grounded them with huge magnolia branches then filled in with zinnias, dahlias, shasta daisies, and cosmos. The night got chilly, and for the late stayers, I was happy to give them my knitted blankets and shawls. That alone is a reason to keep knitting! 

Happy Sunday folks, 

Kristen

I just finished the last and perhaps the most difficult and ambitious phase of my years-long declutter journey. I had albums, boxes and bags chock full of photos and family memorabilia. For years I've been waiting for the perfect time to go through them. When that perfect time never arrived, I just decided to do it anyway. Ignoring it made me feel anxious and overwhelmed and it was finally time to preserve the best and toss the rest--one photo at a time. Please read on to see what I did to tame our family memorabilia. 

Three problems screamed out to me:

1) Disorganized,

2) Not accessible,

3) And too much of it, this being the main problem.

I purchased these photo/memory boxes above from Target. Their large size meant that we could save photos of any size, including letters, documents, medals, etc. and neatly organize them. I vowed to keep only what would fit inside and if it didn't fit, it couldn't stay. In the end I would guess we got rid of 75%. That may seem harsh, but while sentimentality has its place in curating family mementos, practicality has to be a part of it too, so we did our best to save the best and toss the rest. 

Whenever I tackle a big job like this I allow myself a good long time to cross the finish line. I gave myself 6 weeks for this and I needed it! I broke it down to two categories:

1) The modern stuff: fifteen photo albums that chronicled our almost 50 years of married life. Also a few DVDs, CDs and thumb drives with photos and videos, plus yearbooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, baby books and vacation memorabilia. 

2) The old stuff: same as the above minus the modern technology, and most of it tragically disorganized belonging to relatives who died before I was born. This filled six large banker's type boxes that my mother had taken from her family home and stored  in my attic.

I decided to tackle the easy part first, our family albums, which had not been opened in years. I knew that we would enjoy the pictures much more if there were less of them and were easier to access. 

First I set up a command center. I took the albums out of their hiding place and for the next few weeks made my living room the work hub. You know I love my timers, so every day I set a timer for 10-60 minutes, whatever I thought I could handle. I pried each photo I wanted to save off its album page and  tossed the duplicates, blurry photos and the cumbersome albums into the trash. Saved photos were labeled on the back with the date, event and the people, I won't lie, this took time, and then I began to fill the boxes I had labeled in advance: vacations, holidays, friends, home and garden, etc.  As the weeks went on, I began to notice real progress; the seemingly mile-high stack of photo albums was finally down to the last one. My husband joined me on occasion and loved seeing our early pictures when we were young and gorgeous (his words)! I didn't worry about putting anything in chronological order and as long as they were in the correct box I was good. The pictures are just for our amusement and if you look through the vacations box, you might pick up a photo of a trip to England in 1975 and the very next photo could be from a waterski trip twenty years later.  

With that job done, next on the list was the dreaded banker's boxes. I waited until my brother could visit, the only other person who had any reasonable stake in it, and we went through them together. For the most part they were full of things from our mother's large family. Over the years I had taken a stab at them hoping to engage mother's help but she always put me off, hinting that I should go through them when she was gone, and that is just what happened.  It would now be up to my brother and me to decide what stays and what goes, what was important and what was not. Prior to us, no one had been up to the task, and we both agreed that a mountain of meaningless memorabilia mixed in with valuable family history was not something we wanted to leave behind. 

We worked over a ten day period and of course set a timer, never for more than an hour at a time. 

We made a box for our father's family and one for our shared childhood. Junk was tossed and saved photos and papers were placed in the labeled boxes. So far so good.

Lastly we created a box for our mother and a second box for our mother's extended family. Mother's box was easy--she had been a cheerleader and a beauty queen and was the youngest of seven children and the only daughter. She was a very spoiled gal and there were many fun pictures and mementos and we had a good old time filling that box.

As for the larger family box, we saved the following:

-All correspondence.

-A few pictures of our grandparents as a young couple and several more over the years to represent their lives together.

-One or two pictures each of the members of our grandparents' extended family.

-A curated selection of large family gatherings, picnics, birthday parties.

-Formal family portraits

-Photos prior to 1900.

-Early California, charming with orange groves, empty beaches and California missions before they had been restored.

-Family homes here in California and also in Tennessee, including our grandfather's family home in a pretty hollow on the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains near Knoxville, TN.

-Lastly and most importantly, any document pertaining to family history and lineage. We had to take care going through the boxes because our grandfather's family has been in America since the 1600s and we didn't want to accidentally throw out anything that might include family history. Our family tree, somewhat disjointed with accounts written in many hands, is early on filled with huntsmen and trappers, but would later boast one but maybe two (needs research) Revolutionary War veterans, plus Civil War veterans, a senator, a fire chief and a judge.We can also claim a distant relation to a US President and a full blooded Cherokee Indian as an ancestor. Both my brother and I were delighted to find we have a smidge of Native American DNA to prove it! Anything that pertained to our family history is now gathered in one place and it will be a future task of mine to study it and try to decipher fact from fiction.  It's been recommended that my boxes be firesafe and I'll have to think about that.

Even though it was mostly tedious everything was going well until the day I opened the box that contained my deceased uncle's belongings. By this time my brother had gone home and had given me liege to do what I felt was best with the rest. I knew this box would be sad. I had four uncles who died young, one in high school, one in college, and two in WWII. As I handled my oldest uncle's photos and read his letters, I could sense the heartache my grandmother would have felt as she packed up her son's belongings for the last time, a freshman at The University of Southern California at the time of his death. No wonder my mother would not go near these boxes, it would have been far too sad for her. Even though my mother was young when her brothers died, she had her memories, and the one I always found so heartbreaking was how she described her mother, crumbling and shattering, almost disappearing after each dreadful loss of a son, all four in the span of a mere decade. Could my grandmother ever imagine that these boxes of sad mementos and tragic stories would eventually come to her granddaughter whom she would never meet? It took me a full week to get through the box because I had to stop often and collect my wits and wipe my eyes. Growing up, I often gazed at my uncles photos resting on grandad's mantel and listened to countless stories of "the boys". Telling and retelling stories were comforting to my grandfather, my two remaining uncles and my mother. So for my uncles who remain perpetually young in my mind, I gave each a manilla envelope. Inside are their personal letters, awards, silly poems, photographs of capers at the malt shop, and newspaper clippings of fancy country dances and happy days. Their stories are preserved and neatly organized and I feel that by doing this I honored my grandmother and my darling grandad, and that was important to me.

As I wrapped up my project, I realized that I accidentally captured the stories of our lives; those of my husband and me and our shared lives together, my mother's and father's stories, and the stories belonging to those I never knew. My family history became alive and meaningful to me. These boxes hold treasures that are accessible to anyone who is interested. That may only be me, and that is fine, whatever happens to them after I die is none of my business. This I did for me.

As a side note, my brother owns NO PHOTOS. Over the years he has scanned everything he wants and stores it in the cloud. This visit, when he found something he wanted, he set it aside and scanned it later that night and, wham-bam, just like that he was done with it. 

Lastly, I apologize for making such a long post. I couldn't find a way to shorten it. If you've read this far, perhaps it's because you have a similar overflowing photo situation at your house. I hope my story encourages you to get to it. You can do it! I'd love to hear your declutter and organizing stories!

Shopping Links

I purchased these Target Paperboard Storage Boxes, set of 2

 But I LOVE these products from Amazon:

3 Pack Document Storage Boxes

15"x13" Linen Storage Box

I also found these from Joanne's.

12"x12" storage box from Park Lane

12"x12" three drawer photo box from Simple Life

Now for something entirely off topic, I'm leaving you with some pretty photos of flower arrangements I like to keep next to my sink.

shortbread with cosmos and dahlias

a large summer squash leaf, dill, dahlias, zinnias and pink cosmos

close up of foxglove and dahlia

shasta daisy, foxglove, dahlia, hydrangea, white cosmos and dill

yellow nasturtiums, shasta daisy, hydrangea, oregano, white cosmos and a tiny yellow lily

roses, shasta daisies, zinnias and a foxglove

magnolia

roses, shasta daisy, hydrangea and an unknown green filler

roses, oregano and an unknown green that hangs over our fence.

roses and olive branches