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Well, the Kansas Jayhawks won their first-round game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament today, which means I’m one game closer to having a clean kitchen.

Here’s the thing: I don’t have cable television, so I’ll be listening to at least some of the games. Listening to basketball requires a certain level of concentration or you miss something unlike, say, baseball, where every pitch has several seconds of prelude. Anyway, if I’m going to listen to basketball, I’m left to do mindless chores while I’m at it. (Somehow sitting and staring at the wall just doesn’t cut it.) Hence, kitchen-cleaning.

Open storage

I’m fortunate to have a nice kitchen. My late husband, an architect, designed it about 15 years ago, and he was a big believer in open storage. “Look at Julia Child’s kitchen!” he’d say, pointing to Madame Julia’s pegboard. “Everything’s within reach!” (That was long before she donated it to the Smithsonian.)

He was right, of course, but there’s another thing about open storage he didn’t talk about: dust. Open storage means countless places for dust to collect, and collect it does. Fortunately, we also installed a well-functioning ventilating fan, so it’s plain dust, rather than the icky-sticky dust that accumulates in many kitchens.

Take magnabars

Hubby was a huge fan of magnabar (which I thought was a brand name but evidently not) or, generically, magnetic knife holders. They’re great, and we have lots of them:

(Click on any photos for larger versions.)

In addition to those four are two others that I didn’t photograph. Handy as they are, each bar has about a half-inch ledge on top of it that is a fabulous dust-catcher, especially given that those ledges are guarded by sharp, or at least metal, objects. So, being lazy in the department of cleaning non-disease-causing kitchen surfaces, those bars catch a lot of dust…until the basketball tournament.

The four bars featured above are all dust-free, I’m happy to say, as of the game-ending buzzer. The last two bars didn’t get dusted, although I want it perfectly clear that they aren’t so dusty that you could actually see the dust in a little Internet photo. Really.

Take open shelving

Open shelves also are very handy. There’s one next to the sink on which to place those big things you use at the sink: colanders and salad spinners. I also keep my apple spinner and juicer there. Above the sink is another, shallower, open shelf for liquid measures, paper towels and kitchen scale.

In addition, there’s the shelf under the pan lids, and the shelf under the pans. (Pans and lids hang on slatwall, which you might recognize from your favorite retail store.) Dust-catchers all. But not today. Not this minute. All got the treatment as KU pummeled poor Portland State. (OK, not the shelf above the pans; it may wait until the Final Four, if we get there.)

More to do

I’m going to watch the second-round game at a friend’s house, which means I’m relying on the Jayhawks to win that one so I can continue my spring cleaning, March Madness style, the following weekend at home. There are those last two magnabars, the shelf above the pans, the shelf that the microwave and a collection of my daughter’s school art projects sits on. I’m just going to hope the Jayhawks’ role in the tournament lasts that long. Don’t know whether I want to clean while listening to somebody else’s team.