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Sep 4, 2013

Week 1: Pantry Organization Part I

Today's goal for the 91 Day De-Clutter Challenge was to clean out the pantry.  I wasn't able to do my big pantry today (the two-year-old has been trying his level best to absolutely destroy the house the instant you're not looking directly at him, and he'd have to be out of my line of sight while I worked on the big pantry), but I did manage to get my "pantry cabinets" done.  Big pantry is scheduled for tomorrow!

Today was a "big grocery shopping" day.  You know, the kind where you have a huge cart-full of food at the end and requires more than four trips to the car to bring it all in?  Well, some of the things I got were pantry items, so I put them in my before picture on the counter just so I could later appreciate how I was going to fit everything in there.  (I didn't.)



Look at all that space I managed to clear out on the top shelf!  The basket and couple of loose items on the counter now are destined for the big pantry tomorrow, where I'll probably find a few things that will need to migrate back into the pantry cabinet as well - good thing I left myself some space!

I moved my jars of flour, sugar, and salt onto the kitchen counter (behind the basket in the After photo).  That freed up some space on the top shelf.  Then from there I went through everything and made sure there was nothing past its expiration date (which there wasn't - we moved in not too long ago, and the only expired thing I kind of found out by accident when I cooked a year-out-of-date Enchilada Kit my mom had given us that smelled GROSS - we didn't eat it).

I tried to keep only the things that I use regularly in the kitchen in these cabinets, and put anything that is not used frequently or that was surplus in the big pantry.  Here's how I organized it:


You'll notice some things didn't move (the kids' snack items, for example, were in the perfect spot to grab quickly), but I definitely rearranged things so they were in some kind of order.  Everything is easy to grab, and easy to see (with the exception of my meal kits behind the K-Cups - but I know what's back there, so it's easy to move the coffee and see what I have "in stock" for dinner).

Tomorrow I hit the big pantry and see if I need to fill up some of that extra space I made!




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