2012 February 06 — Domestic Imperfection

(If you missed the first part of this post you can read about it HERE and you can read about the Less Mess Project HERE).

My pantry is finished and I’m totally in love with it!

As a reminder as to how totally disorganized I am, here is my pantry before…

Nice right? It stressed me out just to look in there. I’m already not a fan of cooking and this made it even worse. It’s too bad that I’m not one of those people that thinks cooking is the bees knees, since I have to do it everyday. Wouldn’t it be awesome if your hobby was also something that you had to do? I don’t need to have a creatively decorated house, but I do need to cook healthy meals for my family. And to add insult to injury, after you cook then you have to clean it all up.

Anyway, rabbit trail. What I meant to say was that cooking it a little more fun now that my pantry is awesome.

So as a quick recap of the last post…

After emptying it out, painting it white, and stenciling, my pantry looked like this…

And here, ladies and gentleman, is my organized masterpeice!

It makes me smile just to look in there.

I even managed to take the rack off the back of my door. That was probably the hardest part, finding a new place for all that rack stuff. I plan on taking the door off completely and replacing it with old wooden screen door. I’ve gotta show off all that beautiful organization, you know? Plus it’s a great way to add some personality to the kitchen. I plan on painting it the same color as the kitchen cabinets (which is the same color as the stencil…Sherwin Williams Harbor Grey). I just need to get my hands on a door first….and I don’t care if its No Spend February or not, if I find the perfect door I WILL buy it.

Let’s take a closer look shall we? On the top shelf we have baking supplies and a basket full of to go toddler snacks.

Below that we have more baking supplies in Tupperware canisters (that I’ve had forever). The labels are just cheapo scrap booking stickers from Hobby Lobby – I don’t think a dollar has ever made me feel so fancy before!
Then we have crackers and pastas. The pasta is stacked two deep – we eat a lot of pasta.

The clear canisters are OXO POP Canisters. I originally wanted pretty circular glass ones, but I could’t find any that were airtight. Plus my pantry isn’t very big and circular canisters aren’t the best use of space. I love these OXO ones though, they have a button on top that you press to take the lid off, then you press it again to seal it closed. Plus they’re stackable and the seal matches my stencil color (very important!) I bought mine HERE on Amazon…

They’re not the cheapest, but they’re the nicest canisters I found by far. (If you want big ones to hold flour you’ll have to buy the big 5.5 quart ones separately.) I also found a few randomly at HomeGoods, they were way cheaper but only had a few at a time.
(Update – A reader recommended these Lock and Lock containers, said they’re awesome and they’re WAY cheaper. Wishing I’d have seen them first…)

Next shelf down we have rice, beans, etc and cereals. The ‘MIX’ cereal is for me…I like my cereals mixed – the more the merrier! I used to just pull out every cereal in the morning and put a little of each in my bowl. Now the plan is to pour the cereal remnants from the other canisters onto mine so I only have to pour one cereal in the morning. I great idea if I may say so myself.

The lowest shelf is canned goods. I found some risers at Target and they work great – now I can see everything. Next to the risers is our supply of Costco tomato bisque soup. Have ya’ll had this stuff? I don’t recommend you try it unless you never want to be able to eat another brand of tomato soup ever again. It’s that good.

On the floor we have some bins (from The Container Store- the shelf baskets are from there too) that holds unopened condiments on the top and onions and potatoes on the bottom. Next to that is my old onion and potato holder which now holds tea bags for sweet tea. It wasn’t quite big enough for potatoes… plus I’m pretty sure it didn’t get enough airflow because my potatoes grew sprouts like it was their job in there.

I didn’t wan’t to waste any valuable space, so I the sides of the pantry I put little wire baskets to hold my spices and whatnot. They’re actually pencil holder drawer thingys – most normal sized ones were too long for this space so they took forever to find. Guess where I found these? Yup, The Container Store.

Hubby just screwed them into the wall like so…

The other side is a little deeper so I found wider ones to hold other (ugly) stuff. These side baskets are the only reason I was able to take the rack off the back of the door, otherwise my screen door dreams might have been squandered.

Here is a picture so you can see how many there are…

(Gosh it’s hard to take pictures of the inside of a tiny pantry!)

That’s the grand tour! Do you love it as much as I do? I’m pretty confident that I can keep it this organized for the long haul, everything we use is in there and it all has a place. Here is a side by side before and after shot, looking at that after makes me feel so calm and happy!