Tips and hints

If you live in a small kitchen--and this one is great, it is not a tiny house by any means. Full size refrigerator, oven, double sink. The dishwasher is small but we haven't used it in a month, for 2-4 of us. (Yes, it's been a whole month already. No wonder I'm a little restless.) If you live in a small kitchen, it is not that hard to make it work. Obviously, you can't stock up, unless you have storage somewhere else. We have the big bag of dog food in the laundry room, and empty it into a bin in the kitchen 3 or 4 times before we get a new one. K likes to buy snacks in bulk for guests. They are in the guest room closet for now. When we leave, they'll go back to his house. If you like to buy giant packages of toilet paper, can you store them in the attic? We do have an attic, with pull-down stairs, but I don't need to save money on toilet paper bad enough to go up there once a week or so. Maybe you think it's worth it. Maybe you don't use an oven and can store things there. I like to bake. I make bread and even pies sometimes, but not every day. My rolling pin and a few other things are in a drawer in the guest room closet. Do I use my grater every day? My citrus squeezer, my cookie scoop? Things in the drawers are easier to keep track of if they are only the daily necessities. Even that could possibly be outsourced--is there a drawer under your TV with junk in it? How many forks and spoons do you use? If you wash the dishes after every meal, most things don't need to be taking up prime real estate. The challenge, I have found, is to remember where you put it. The scraper I used to make bread the first week was missing for most of the month--until I went to get the rolling pin from the auxiliary drawer in the closet! Oh, right, I remember putting it there. I don't have canisters on the counter, the space is too valuable. I don't have a huge assortment of spices. The quiche that's in the oven called for a sprinkling of paprika. Will the quiche taste terrible without it? I doubt it. I will have to keep track. OK, today I'm using a can of black beans; need to put another can on the list. Don't buy 2 cans. I don't have a variety of grains right now--no quinoa, farro, couscous. Two kinds of pasta: long and short. I do have 3 kinds of flour, but you probably don't need them. I might whittle it down to 2. On the Massachusetts front, the P&S Agreement is signed, so it looks like the sale will go through. Our furniture will go into storage the end of March, the day before the closing. Then we will either stay in NC, travel, or find a short-term rental. In any case, the longer it takes to find the perfect North Shore house, the more money we will save. (Storing furniture is not very expensive; the bigger cost is moving it twice, but still less than a month's mortgage, utilities, etc.). One of the details to work out is planning a trip north, less than a week, to pack up and get rid of everything we left there. And say hello to Dad and D. I would love to know when the weather will be good. When will the airfares be best? When will we have no obligations here?