Kitchen Pantry Update: Part 1

Typical Jen fashion would be do cram 17 hours and 26 minutes of projects, blood, sweat and tears into one long winded post.  And although my pantry organizing and sprucing better not take me seventeen hours, or cause any blood and tears, I am not jamming this post with everything all at once.  I thought I would take a new approach this week, since it is kitchen challenge month and we are doing these projects together.

That's right, I am dedicating my whole week to cleaning out my food cupboard and pantry.  Because I am doing it in bite size steps in hopes of getting it done right and the way I have been envisioning it for awhile now.   And while most of our projects go on over the course of a few days, I typically smash all those days together with too many photos and not enough details, so this week, you are getting a true real life as we go update of the progress we have made so far, and the plans we have for tomorrow.

So who is ready to tackle their food cabinets and pantry with me!?  And let's make a drinking game out of the times I blush this week for accidentally typing panty vs. pantry.  It's already happened once this month.... game on!

Our pantry has been working fairly well over the years.  We organized it awhile back here and you caught an updated glimpse of it here.

Clearly winter is here and I am getting a good visual of why I have been gaining weight the last couple of months... we have been hoarding food!

Why yes, that is a pineapple in my pantry... why wouldn't there be?  The site of this gives me a case of the yuks.  We have almost all of the essential food storage we need, great containers and baskets.  It just comes down to using them, and even more so, putting them in places that make sense and keep things simple to access.  Our snacks live up high because I always figured that by placing them higher, we would be likely to snack less.  But that isn't necessarily the case, in fact, it causes my six year old to monkey his way up those shelves to grab one of his buried snack containers.  The other boys are constantly dragging our stools to the pantry to reach their snacky items.  When I occasionally purchase items on sale or in bulk, we have an overflow shelf, which has gotten a bit out of control.  And you wouldn't even see all the snacks nicely placed in their clear airtight storage, because there is a huge pineapple in front of them... sigh...  A lot of the systems we have work great, when we use them.  That's all it comes down to.  Sometimes we get busy and lazy and let our systems fail.  And sometimes they just don't make sense or are not easy enough to maintain. 

Our other food cabinet was doing pretty well, since just some of the basics live there and all of our baskets were nicely labeled.  For the most part, everything has a designated place, and I am taking note that is why it is working!

So, the first step to any organizing or re-organizing project, is to empty everything out!

That is our table with everything removed from the cabinets, and it will probably remain that way for a couple of days.  At least now we can see what we have again!

At this point, I also vacuum along all the edges and wipe everything down with a clean rag. 

There is a huge part of me begging myself to paint or do something with the inside of our cabinets.  But I am saving that for kitchen renovation day, so for now, they will stay boring.  Same with the pantry, being that we are planning a large scale renovation down the line, I don't want to invest in building pull out pantry drawers, which would make our lives sooooo much easier since our storage space is pretty deep.  But, I did want to finally take on those wire shelves.  Seriously, why wire?  They make absolutely zero sense to me.  Crumbs fall all the way to the floor, and even worse, drips and syrup and everything else is such a challenge to clean up between those itty bitty wire slats.  And don't even get me started on how certain things don't sit nicely on them and the proceed to tip over...

Rant over.

The fix was super simple, some foam board found in the craft section at most stores, even at some dollar stores!

We measured twice, cut once...

The foam board clearly wasn't going to be durable enough to handle multiple washings or scrubbing, should something spill.  And I worried it would quickly fall apart from things constantly being pulled in and out of the shelves.

Leftover drawer liner to the rescue!  I purchased a double roll pack awhile back and I have been using it for a few projects here and there, and knew it was the perfect cleanable solution to the foam boards.  I believe I found it at Marshalls or TJ Maxx for those wondering. 

It applied super quick and easy to the foam, all bubbles were easily smoothed out.

Into the pantry they went!  So bright and pretty!

Once the boards were all cut down and the paper was applied to all, I realized that I would line the shelves of the over the door organizer as well.  Might as well go big or go home!

Squeal!  LOVE the happiness in going on behind the pantry door now!

We added in a small step stool {found at HomeGoods} that we can collapse down so we don't lose storage space, yet hopefully it will prevent climbing kiddos.

And as you may have seen in the past, we hang a clipboard on the door so I can keep my pantry inventory and shopping list easily accessible.

So now we are left with a blank slate after day one of removing all of the contents, lining the shelves and wiping everything down.

The next steps will be:

• Update our pantry inventory sheet
• Create a storage plan
• Design labels
• Put everything back where it makes the most sense for our fam

So stay tuned as a few of our kitchen hot spots get a little love and attention.  More play by play to come as the week goes on!

What kitchen project did you take on this weekend?  Any other wire shelf haters out there?  How about words you almost always type wrong?