Day 8 Purging Tips – Plastic Cups and Glasses

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We’re one week into the 31 Days of 10-minute Purging Tips Challenge. Congratulations for all you’ve accomplished this week. Let’s tackle that collection of plastic cups and glasses that inexplicably grow in our cabinets today. Remember, we’re working towards our goal to eliminate things we don’t need from our lives and home so that we can better enjoy life and we do that by clearing clutter. 

If you don’t have a collection of plastic cups raise your hand. I don’t know how it happens, but it seems that every time I close the cabinet door those cups magically multiply. Really. I take 10 minutes and ruthlessly purge those plastic cups; a month later our plastic cup numbers have doubled. Again. I can’t explain it, but I’m guessing that it happens to you, too

Clearing Clutter – Tips for purging plastic cups and glasses. 

Grab the 6 purging bags you created earlier, print out the free two page Purging Clutter Checklist and head to the kitchen. Be sure you have at least one counter cleared off to work on. 

Take Everything Out- Pull all the plastic cups out of the cabinet. Don’t forget to pull any plastic lids out that go with the cups. 

Group Like Items Together – Quickly group like items together. Now that you’re a one-week purging veteran, you can group like items together as your’re taking them out (combining step one and two). Place all the cups with lids together. Place the same sized cups together. Place the same sports team cups together. Place all the children’s cups together. 

Evaluate – Look at each group you’ve created. Throw away any cracked cups or lids that don’t belong to a cup. Are there any cups with faded logos you can get rid of? Look at how many cups are in each category. How many do you really need? Will you get more baseball cups at the game next week? Can you get rid of some of those cups knowing you’ll get more at the next game?

Purge – Remove items you don’t need to keep and place them in one of your 6 purging bags. You can keep one or two in the garage for chores like painting or gardening, but most of the ones that need to go need to really go. Broken cups and lids with no matching cup can go in the recycling bag (check for the recycling triangle). You can donate the other cups if they’re in decent condition. 

Put Everything Away – Put the items you’ve decided to keep back away. If you find that you still have too many cups to fit neatly into your cabinet, reevaluate and look for other cups you can purge. Don’t worry, the cups will magically reproduce and you’ll have too many plastic cups again soon. 

With 25+ moves under my belt, I’ve learned tips about how to layout your kitchen so that it works best for you.

Are you in the mood to organize your kitchen now? Here are some ideas I used when I helped my friend, J., organize her kitchen.

Organizing your kitchen doesn’t have to cost a penny. You can organize your kitchen for free with repurposed items. Another day of purging down! Take a minute to congratulate yourself and enjoy your nicely organized plastic cups. Good job. Tomorrow we’ll tackle purging our sock drawer.  Be sure to stop back by for Day Nine in the 31 Days of 10-Minute Purging Tips challenge. Let’s keep focused on our goal of simplifying our lives so we can enjoy them more fully.

Find all my decluttering tips, printables and challenges in the table below. You can scroll though the table and look for ideas or search for specific ideas with the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner (on desktop). Click on the topic and then click through the specific article.