We spend nearly all of our home time in the kitchen. Cooking, baking, working at the kitchen table, doing laundry. It all happens in the kitchen. Part of the reason behind this is psychological- it has the most windows and is the brightest. The other part is necessity.
Lately, we've found ourselves getting really discouraged at just how much stuff can accumulate in our few kitchen cabinets. Our "system" was not working anymore and Orgjunkie's 52 Weeks of Organization plan lit the fire under our proverbial tushies!
Princess agrees that we need some help.
In just a few hours, our kitchen cabinets went from jumbled, disorganized and frustrating to organized. Not perfect, not magazine-worthy, but good enough for us. We wanted to avoid investing in tons of organizational bins and baskets and just work with what we have. And what we have is TONS of Tupperware. A whole, entire cabinet devoted to plastic storage containers of all shapes and sizes. Which just happened to be perfectly suited to giving our jumbled cabinets a little order.
Before:
So there you go. Those are our "pantry" cabinets where we store all of our dry food and baking supplies. Here is how it looked after we cleaned everything out:
We completely emptied and cleaned out each cabinet, sorted all of the food into categories (canned and jarred, pasta/grains, rice and dry beans, flours and sugars, etc.). We tossed anything expired and donated whatever we weren't using to the food pantry.
Yay! Here is the bottom cabinet, where we keep most of our "daily use" food items. We already owned those tiered can holders and we were using the Clementine boxes in other parts of the house. In the back are extras/things we don't frequently use like a big box of salt that we use to refill our smaller salt shaker.
Here is the top-left cabinet where we keep baking supplies and coffee/tea. We decided to move the coffee cups over here to make our morning routine more streamlined. The coffee maker lives on the counter under this cabinet, so it makes sense.
We transferred contents of opened boxes into Tupperware to keep them fresh. We also sorted baking supplies and boxed them up to make it easier to find what we need. Decorating supplies are all in one box now, baking ingredients in another and there is one whole box for chocolate chips. Woohoo!
In the top-right cabinet, we keep cereals and boxed foods like cake mix and crackers. We didn't take a photo because it's kind of boring.
So there you have it! How we organized our pantry without spending a dime! Are you doing any organizing projects this week??
Linked to Transformation Thursday @ The Shabby Chic Cottage! Check it out:
