Here it is – National Match-Up Day!
The first Monday of October when those food storage container drawers and cabinets get cleaned out, sorted, and vacuumed! My drawer always needs vacuuming, does yours?
Why the first Monday in October?
This is when my food storage container drawer is mostly empty. After roasting tomatoes, freezing berries, baking granola, and pesto, my food storage containers are almost all used up and the drawer is practically empty.
Want the entire list of easy steps to organizing? Check here for “The 7 Steps to Organizing Food Containers” complete with vacuuming out of the drawer. The first step in any organizing project is always take everything out of the drawer, cabinet or cupboard and wipe it down so that you’re starting with a clean slate.
This is my favorite product to use with my storage jars. Replacement lids. While the jars have plenty of life left in them the tops can get rusty. These are great for not having to buy an entire case of jars but only replacing lids.
This year, to celebrate the “3rd Annual National Match Up Day,” I’ve teamed up with The Container Store for a care package to be sent to a Go Gingham reader! The Container Store will send one lucky reader a goodie box filled with $100 worth of home organizing items – delivered to your doorstep.
Here’s how to enter….
- Leave a comment below telling me what’s your least favorite area to organize – linen closet, food storage drawer, under the sink bathroom cabinet, junk drawer – you get the idea
- Using “Random Number Generator” and having my handsome assistant (husband) as a proxy, I’ll draw a number.
- Contest ends Friday, October 11, 2013 at 10:00AM.
- You may enter one time only.
- Sorry international readers but this contest is for U.S. residents only.
Go Gingham related links:
How to organize those recipes and cookbooks – but no burning books!
Organizing recipes and set-up binders for the collection – you’ll be so glad once you do
Pantry basics for the home cook – what’s in my pantry
Refrigerator basics for the home cook – what’s in my refrigerator
Take the night off and let your kids cook dinner every week
How our freezer gets used – ways to organize and optimize
Disclosure: I have not received any compensation for writing this post but thought a care package from “The Container Store” would be fun. I have no material connection to the company. This is being disclosed in accordance with the FTC’s guidelines.
Go Gingham 
My least favorite area to organize is the food pantry.
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My “junk drawer,” where I put every miscellaneous odd and end until the day of reckoning, when I can no longer get the drawer closed…or sometimes, open.
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My kitchen drawer that holds all my measuring spoon and cups, spatulas, mixer attachments and all the other little miscellaneous kitchen things. I have tried to organize it over and over and nothing seems to work for long.
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the garage…there is so much stuff that I don’t know what it is or where it should go that I just get Overwhelmed!
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My junk drawer has to be my least favorite. That’s why it hasn’t been done for a couple of years 😉
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My least favorite spot to organize is the guest room closet. It’s huge – biggest closet in the house, which I originally thought was awesome. Now, I know that it just becomes a catchall that I have to clean out every few months. No other area in the house collects stuff like this closet… sigh…
I like National Match Up Day. I’m going to go organize my (small, easy) container drawer right now!
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Kerr also makes plastic lids for their jars, for when the jars are used for storage instead of canning. They eliminate the fussing with the separate ring/lid when opening the jar, and I assume they last longer (no rusting). I love ’em.
My inventory of storage containers was so low yesterday, I had to break down and buy canning jars and ziploc containers for freezing the 4 batches of soup, and canning the 11 quarts of applesauce I made!
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My least favorite area to organize is the “to be put away” area of the basement. The basement in general is very organized, except for this catch-all area whose accumulation occasionally piles up without constant attention!
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I’d agree with Michelle – the worst place to clean up is the “I’ll put it away later pile/drawer/room/garage” (see —– it’s growing!)
I’ve decided that it soon will be “Get rid of the re-usable water bottles that we’ve acquired over time” day at my house. Anybody need any?
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My least favorite area to organize is our “office” which is also our hobby area, craft area and somewhat a storage area….aka:the junk room:)
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My least favorite area to organize is getting to be where we store pots and pans for cooking, baking and the like. My MIL keeps sending us stuff that she thinks we need or that she doesn’t want anymore because she got something newer. Since we moved in, we’ve gotten an additional 5-shelf unit and DH has built me a counter where we store/use the pressure cooker, panini maker, food processer, etc.
I’m very grateful to have it all, as I can’t tell you how long we worked with one frying pan and one sauce pan … I just wish it didn’t all look so cluttered.
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My least favorite area would be the guest room/office/sewing room/storage unit… yea, it’s definitely a multi-purpose room that really has no purpose whatsoever except causing headaches whenever I go in there. We mainly keep the door closed! Good thing my parents are coming to visit for Thanksgiving and we’re being forced to clean it out, hopefully for good.
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I think my least favorite area to organize would have to be the pantry – it’s a set of cabinets over the washer and water heater in our current house and anything above the second shelf is a hassle to access.
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Oh, Jeff is so excited for National Match-Up day! My least favorite area to organize is my photo studio closet, because the minute I get it straightened up and re-organized, I start throwing stuff in there again and we have the same problem. I’m sure the Container Store gift pkg will fix it all right up! Ha!
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oooooooh, what a nice prize. I can’t stand to clean out the bathroom sine cabinet. 😦 I swear, I do not know how all those things get there! 😦
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I have many areas I’m avoiding, but the area that would be pretty straightforward yet has been delayed week after week are the drawers and shelves in my bathrooms! Old makeup, almost finished lotions, stray cotton balls & q-tips, and all those tiny hotel shampoo/conditioner bottles…Look, I just talked myself out of doing it again for today!
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My pile of paperwork is my least favorite thing to organize.
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The pantry. The shelves are very deep, and it is three above and three below the sets of doors. I can only do two shelves at a time, just the bulkiness of items.
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Definitely the pantry. My shelves are also very deep and small items get lost in the back.
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Underneath my bathroom sink is area I do not like to clean. It is full of old makeup and seems damp!
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My Least favorite are is the snack cupboard! All of those half eaten boxes and bags and almost finished pretzels 😦
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I dislike cleaning out my linen closet. It is hard to organize when there is not enough space for everything.
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Oh my gosh, I would say my guest room is my least favorite room to organize because it is also my sewing room and I always wait until I’m having company to start organizing it.
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My least favorite place to organize is the Linen Closet. You know, all those fitted sheets. They just never fold quite right, and always look messy. No matter what I do, they are bunching out, pushing everything else. I open the closet door, and without fail, something always falls out. Ugh, what a mess!
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The junk drawer – it is where I put everything that is possibly usable but have no other place to put it. Plus my husband puts everything in there including items that have a place other than the junk drawer…
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The attic, it’s our catch all for things that don’t have a home and as quickly as I get it emptied it fills again.
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Tough to pick just one area – but I’d have to say our garage. The boys are off at college and tons of stuff is in the limbo stage – cleaned out of their respective rooms but they ( or I ) can’t decide if the items are keepers or throwers. Oh the room we will have…someday 😉
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Oh boy! My least favorite spot to organize is my junk draw (all three of them lol)
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My kitchen cabinets! They’re 1960’s era…bad design with deep unreachable shelves and extremely narrow doors.
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My messiest spot is my work desk. Too busy working to organize, and so much more productive if I was organized. Oh well, someday…..
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Currently, Pantry is my nightmare — shelves are too deep – can’t see into the back, and have to move too many things to get to what’s in the back. We have TONS of space, but the layout makes it very difficult to use, resulting in over buying and things not getting used, although we have them…. 😦
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I hate organizing the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I have very limited cabinet space so every cabinet is packed to overflowing. The cabinet under the sink is so low that I have to sit in the floor while I’m doing it. Too old for that!
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Junk drawer, singular? That’s for rookies. I have three (ok, four) in the kitchen, and they are painful to try to do anything with, or even open.
But I do think about it, which is more than I can say for the office….
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Under the bathroom sink cabinet for sure. Ugh! I never can seem to get this to be user-friendly.
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Definitely my junk drawer. There’s just so many misc things that I don’t know what to do with and I can never seem to find things in it when I need them.
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Oh my word. The attic with cobwebs? The basement with its bugs and dust? Under-the-step storage because what really, truly GOES there? (No one knows, but somehow it’s full – paper towels, ant traps, super glue, paint, glue guns, fairy boxes full of pixie dust, broken matchbox cars waiting for repair… )
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My least favorite area to organize is the bedroom close. t. It’s a decent size, but poorly laid out for my out-of-sight-out-of-mind organizing “style.”
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The food pantry! It seems to be a never ending battle to keep that area a mess. Spices everywhere, pasta spilling this way and that, there’s just so much in there and no fixed places for any of it.
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It’s a tie between my daughter’s very odd shaped closet and my “holiday” closet where I keep all my holiday decor and wrapping materials. I reorg it every year and it always seems a disaster pus mess!
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