Pantry Re-Org

As you may know, earlier this week, I made a commitment to concentrate on deep cleaning one area of my home for the next 13 weeks. *gulp*

This week, I’m working on my kitchen.  One of the major tasks on the list was cleaning out the pantry.  It’s generally fairly well-organized, but in the last few months, it’s gotten completely out-of-hand.  I must have been buying too many groceries or something because we just kept throwing new food on top of the old food. 

Of course, I forgot to take a picture right before I started, but here’s just after I removed a bunch of stuff from that top shelf.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t look as bad in these pictures as it really was.  But, try to imaging ALL of that stuff that’s sitting on the table, crammed into the top shelf that’s only half empty in these pictures.  Maybe that will get you closer to the actual horror.

My plan was to try to do one shelf at a time, but in the end, I had pulled everything out of the pantry and put it all over the rest of the kitchen.  

When I started putting everything back, I tried to be very careful and make sure that I only put back things that made sense and that we would actually eat.  About 3/4 of the way through, though, I became a little more lax and allowed some of the non-food items (like the coffee pot that exists solely for my mom’s visits) to make it back in because that’s where we’re used to keeping them and it makes sense to us now!

Here’s the after.  Still fairly full, but much more organized.  and we even have a few empty spots just waiting to be filled in!

 

The bottom right shelf is the kids’ snack shelf.  I can’t ever see what’s down there, but it’s just their height and they can easily get to what they need.

As I was pulling everything out, I had fantasies of going to The Container Store and buying a whole pantry worth of cute containers, but it was not to be.  I actually had the containers that are in there already and I think I’m a genius because I used a bunch of Costco cashew/peanut jars and apple sauce jars to store snacks and such. (Each time I filled one of them, I laughed to myself as I imagined the half-hidden eye roll from my husband whenever he pulled one of these jars out of the dish washer…Now my freakish ways have been validated!)  And you can’t beat the simple, stylish beauty of a cat litter box turned into a cat food bin.

Can you?