Awesome Spring Cleaning: The Pantry

An awesome mom is supposed to have an awesome pantry right?  This is a little embarrassing, but I'm going to show you what my pantry used to look like.  I'm only doing this so you will have increased appreciation for the finished product, so no judging.  

I know it was completely out of control. I get that.  I mean, I have a pantry door for a reason...so no one will look in there! (Although I did have a "friend" who made a beeline for my pantry every time she was in my house just to "look"! Come on! Who does that? It's just bad manners).  And the scariest part is that the "before" picture is actually after I took 2 garbage bags of empty packaging and expired food out of it (I didn't think of documenting it at first, I just walked by, freaked out and grabbed a garbage bag!)  It also doesn't include my husbands "collection" of alcohol. I mean, seriously, who needs 5 bottles of half full rum?  I told him his contribution to our new and improved pantry would be to rum and coke himself out of at least 2 of those bottles.

I got the idea for my own pantry transformation when I saw this pin on pinterest from  http://BurlapAndDenim.com/2012/01/my-corner-market-aka-my-pantry/

That pantry was creepy organized, and my first thought was that I didn't want a pantry like that because it would just make me want to eat more often since it's such a happy, clean place to be. My pre-pantry was probably helping my waistline since it was dangerous coming within 10 feet of it, making standing inside and snacking a life or death choice.  But honestly tackling my insane pantry just seemed like SO much work I was getting sweaty just thinking about it.

I read through the tips on BurlapAndDenim but it was going to be hard for me to follow many of them.  Unfortunately we don't live near an Ikea, which has the cheap and fantastic clear plastic containers she used (and they don't sell them online). I don't buy anything from Costco which comes in clear tubs so that wasn't an option either. The Container Store was having a massive sale which was helpful, and then I collected boxes and bins from around the house that had been storing other stuff or just hanging out waiting for a purpose in life.  Of course, this project is leading to a reevaluation of my other cabinets....but that's a different post!!

What I did take away from that amazing pantry pin is that repetition makes things look organized and boxes and baskets are fantastic for putting all those random sized snacks my kids devour at about $15 per minute.  Honestly, do little boys EVER stop eating?

I started my pantry exorcism by just cleaning out everything that was expired, empty (yes I had some empty cereal boxes and an empty Pellagrino box in there) or didn't belong in the pantry (Hot Wheels, Legos, etc).  I took everything out of the pantry and wiped down the shelves and vacuumed everywhere.  Once that was done I sat back and realized the containers I had ordered wouldn't be arriving for 4 more days.  Oops!  So I pushed everything back into the pantry (took the picture above) and shut the door.  My kids noticed the increased danger in selecting a snack almost immediately, but unlike me they were willing to risk life or limb for a granola bar.  Luckily no one was injured in the cleaning out of this pantry.

After organizing things a bit in my new and newly repurposed containers this is the finished product:

Woohoo! I purposely put the fruit basket right next to the snack bars so my kids would SEE them as they were grabbing for other snacks and think of fruit as an equally amazing choice (so far it hasn't worked, but I'm nothing if not persistent).  Best of all the kids can easily see their snacks and chose something themselves, so the new pantry wasn't just something that lasted a couple hours and then started falling into the usual insane mess.  It's been really easy to keep it organized.

Wow! That was a LOT of work Mom! :)