The Pantry...

Since one of my New Years resolutions was to organize the house what a better way to spend the 1st day of the New Year but organizing and cleaning out the pantry! 

Since moving to the new house and never having a pantry before I was thrilled when Jake agreed the closet in the dining room over the stairs was the perfect place to put in a pantry!  Over the year when we needed to get rid of something fast it got stuffed in there.  Unfortunately, it usually didn't come back out!  So needless to say the pantry looked something like this:

As you can imagine...  I found nothing in there and didn't know exactly what I had.  I hate to say it but this also spilled into a couple of cabinets in the kitchen.  (I forgot to take before pictures of those...)

So I started with emptying out the entire pantry onto my dining room table.  I'll save you that picture.  Its not pretty!  Then I just started to separate and throw away outdated and opened items that were bad or stale.  I had a magnet board that I couldn't find a good place for.  I decided I'd put it inside the door.  I could put important stuff that I didn't want to lose on the board.  Then I found (cleaning) the scraps of cork board (from a different project) and decided to put them on the inside of the door too!  I also wanted a pad of paper somehow in there to have to writing down grocery items that we need as we think of them.  You know, for example, I'm looking for cream of chicken soup and I notice there isn't any or I'm taking the last one.  Instead of making a mental note (and forgetting it) I can write it down right away!  That also meant I needed something to store the pens in.  So organize organize organize and this is what I came up with:

The cork board is organizing my packets of seasoning.  I'm so happy with the way it turned out!  I hung them at the bottom of the cork board because I figured I could hang something above them one day but I don't have anything right now. 

One of my best finds by cleaning out the pantry:

Yes it is a dog food bowl.  Yes we still have a dog, but we do not use it anymore.  What could I use this for?  Well, Jake has been begging me to clean up the plastic bags on top of the refrigerator that keep falling on his head...  So my wheels started turning...  Can you guess? 

How awesome is this!!!  I am so happy with the way it turned out!  We can either pop the top off and stuff more bags in or push them in from the bottom.  Now whatever doesn't fit we will not keep anymore!  Nice and organized!

So without further ado, here is my finished pantry and couple of cabinets that had spill over from the messy pantry!

Clean and organized!  The top shelf has a box with wrapping paper, gift bags, and tissue paper in it for a quick grab!

The top shelf has plates that my mom gave us that we usually use on Thanksgiving.  The right side has Chrissy crafts that are only for adult supervision.  The left side has important papers and sewing things.

This cabinet isn't quite finished I'm guessing, but it had overflow from the pantry so it is clean now!

So today is a new day and something new to organize.  I'm taking advantage of my days off because I know once I go back to work the organization projects will get smaller.  I think today I will tackle the countertops and possibly the other side of that cupboard in the picture above! 

Until tomorrow!