Monday, January 24, 2011

Project #1... Check!

My organizational goals for Q3 have come to a bit of a standstill however I do have one completed and ready for sharing! (yea me!)

My kitchen pantry is clean and organized!

As you can see in my 'Before' our pantry was a hot mess of canned goods, Crystal Light, baking supplies and everything else you would expect to see in a family of four's pantry. You can also see the wire shelving that the builder installed which does not make for a very organized pantry. Those of you who have experience with this type of shelving know that things do not always sit evenly.

(Before)
The first thing I did on my quest to clean the pantry was to remove everything from it! Surprisingly, I only found a few things that were expired and needed to be thrown away.

Once I had everything removed, I inserted pre-made shelves from Lowe's right on top of the wire shelving. As I mentioned before, we are moving sometime this year and didn't want to take the time or expense of putting in a long term solution. This solution seems to have worked out just fine so far! I also bought two collapsible bins; one for snacks and the other to hold bread and rice.
Once the shelves were installed, it was time to start organizing! With Mister's help, I put everything back and in an order that made sense for us.

(After!)

It has been so nice being able to find things easily and knowing at a glance what we need to put on the grocery list!

Now on to my next project... organizing 90 years of pictures! My Grandfather has family pictures from the 1920's, pictures of his time in India during WWII and many many more. They have all been stored in small photo books and dumped in an extra large plastic bin.

I've already started going through them and throwing away the pictures that never should have been saved (ie. snow on his roof, pictures of the tv with the ball dropping on NYE for several years, every car accident he passed on the road, etc). Now I am going through which need to be scanned and cataloged. The process thus far has been filled with many smiles, laughter and tears. They are all great memories and I look forward to protecting them for the generations to come.

1 comment:

Mary said...

The pantry looks great! I feel so much better when mine is organized.