Reduce Kitchen Clutter with The Dishwasher Challenge

Mrs. Minafi has heard this line too many times to count: “Want to try an experiment?”. Following our recent move from a 1,700 square foot house to an apartment, we’ve been on a mission to clear away as much clutter as possible and earn back as much time as we can. After staying in a temporary apartment for a few weeks, there was one thing we learned to appreciate fast — how much easier it was keeping a clean kitchen with a smaller dining set.

Before the move, we would often find ourselves with a dishwasher full of clean dishes, with more in the sink already awaiting their turn. We’d need to stop and spend a lot of time putting away everything, then washing everything. We’re only two people, but with a larger family this would even more of a time suck. In our temporary apartment, all dishes on the shelves could fit in a single load of dishes. That got us wondering: why do we have so many dishes?

I called it the Dishwasher Challenge and we decided to try it out — once our belongings were delivered to our new place.

Here’s what you can do to try this out for yourselves:

Once you’re done, put away the items in the dishwasher in your most prime locations. For anything that couldn’t fit, choose to either store them on a higher shelf, give them away or sell them.

We went through this process for the following items:

Having a set of 8 of each of these didn’t exactly click with having an apartment with a breakfast counter that seats 2. With this exercise, we quickly realized that we could lower this to 4 of each of these, and even down to 2 of some. This meant that by and large we wouldn’t put ourselves in a spot where we had a full dishwasher and a sink full of dishes. Problem (mostly) solved!

We’re by no means taking this to the extreme. Why would we need 3 plates when there’s only 2 of us living here? If you really want to try minimizing down, you could challenge yourself to only have 1 of each. We decided that would be a little too far for us, and that we’d be happier with the option to not wash dishes everytime we eat. We did decide to pair down a few items to 2 for areas where we won’t likely use more than 2 in any given day:

We’d been amassing more and more plates and glassware over the last decade, and since we had the space (and occasionally the use) we had no trigger to reorganize. What we didn’t realize was just how much time we could save in our daily lives by reorganizing this little part of our days. By making this small changes we’ve earned back more time in our days!

Why not try the dishwasher challenge this week and let me know how it goes?

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