Pantry Heaven

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Hallelujah, Hallelujah (insert choir singers here).....that's what I sing in my head now every time I open the pantry door!  The task this week on Project Organize Your Entire Life was decluttering a space in the kitchen. Yes - this is a post about my pantry! But since this blog is all about gong shows I figured the pantry pictured below fit the bill.

This task was calling my name - well actually, it was calling Justin's name but more on that later.  I can't believe that I am going to share this, but here is what our pantry looked like before.

Thank God it had a solid door! One of our biggest problems was the recycling. Sherwood Park has an insane recycling program - they want you to recycle anything and everything.  You should have seen the booklet we got when we first moved here about what can be recycled and what can't.  It stayed on the fridge for months, but now I pretty much just toss everything in the clear blue recycling bags and the lovely garbage men pick it up.  Sometimes they slap a nasty sticker on it saying that I am not abiding by recycling regulations and don't pick it up but I just take the sticker off and put the bag out again the next week (we are bad ass that way!).  But I digress. The point is that the recycling was taking over our pantry. We decided that we are going to try our darnedest to empty the indoor recycling more than once a week. Maybe if I put it on a list that I get to check off in permanent Sharpie marker it will actually happen....

Justin has been wanting to redo our pantry since we moved in.  He's been as far as wanting to rip it out and just add cupboards - but I nixed that idea pretty quickly because it just sounded like too big of a project for this house.  He also wanted to take out all of the stupid wire shelving (we HATE wire shelving) and replace it with solid wood.  I finally convinced him that we really didn't need to do any of that and we could make what we have work.  So after a good trip to the dollar store and Staples we were set.  I have to admit that I actually loathe spending money on stuff that is designed just to organize other stuff, but in this case we really needed some new containers so I caved. We also bought some awesome Martha Stewart labels at Staples that are chalkboard, so I didn't have to permanently make up my mind about what is to go in each jar.

After about 3 nights of organizing and pitching a tonne of stuff out, here is our lovely pantry today.

Now that I am looking back on the pictures the top shelf still looks a bit messy, but since Justin is really the only one that can reach up there I guess I will leave it alone! I seriously hope we can keep it like this.  We even managed to find room for the appliances so that I don't have lift my super heavy Kitchen Aid mixer off of the bottom shelf.

Ok, this is enough talk about a pantry (thank you for still reading!!).  I hope if nothing else, it inspires you to tackle a decluttering project that seems insurmountable.

Kelly