“Grandma, why do you have three can openers?”
My grandson was helping me carry groceries in. He opened the drawer by the stove to find a pen, and there they were. Three can openers, side by side, all of them working.
I laughed and said something about always being ready. But later that night, I kept thinking about his question.
It wasn’t just the can openers. I had extras of almost everything in my kitchen. And most of the extras weren’t in the kitchen at all.
They were downstairs, on the metal shelf at the bottom of the basement steps. Dishes, pans, pie plates, and small appliances, all saved “just in case.”
I’d already cleared my kitchen cupboards this fall.
But that shelf showed me something harder. Clearing out the extras once is one thing. Stopping them from coming back is another.
This is how I’m learning to stop hoarding dishes and kitchen things, one habit at a time.
The Shelf at the Bottom of the Stairs
The shelf is gray metal, the kind with four wide shelves. My husband put it up years ago for paint cans.
The paint cans moved to the garage long ago. The kitchen things moved in.
Here is what I found on it when I finally looked: