I don’t know about you but after Christmas I am SO ready to clean out my house. I don’t know if it is the new year, and being stuck in my house with the freezing weather that causes it, but I have a a sneaking suspicion that it might have to do with Christmas day. When the clutter of Christmas decor… and new toys… and wrapping paper… and boxes… and general lack of elementary school … is at an all time high, I just can’t help wanting to go “cleaning ninja-warrior” on my whole house.
Then, when I actually take down the tree with the adrenaline high of singing and twirling to the song Wide Open Spaces, I start scheming about what else needs to have a good thorough cleaning and organizing.
So the question is, where did my schemes lead me to this year? The prime suspect right now are my kitchen cabinets!!! Cue scary music… dun, dun, DUUUNNN.
When we moved in, and redesigned the kitchen, I literally created a map for each and every item to have a home in my kitchen. I used that to help plan the purchase of my cabinets. But as time has gone on, we’ve made a few changes AND made not just a few messes when putting things away. Now about a solid year into living with our new kitchen, I am realizing we need to to some more specific organizing within each individual space.
S0, when my Better Homes and Garden for Walmart challenge for the month of January came up as Refresh Your Home. I literally took that as a sign from the heavens that I needed to work on my refreshing my messy kitchen cabinets. I’m so glad I get to partner with them every other month to refresh a space in my home. And this month I want to present my refreshed snack pantry!
When I got the assignment, I ran ( not walked) to Walmart to scan the isles for what I could use to make my space look cleaner! And I found these great clear BPA free storage containers. I had 4 shelves that could house containers, so the box of 3 containers was a perfect deal for me, and cheaper than buying them individually. I bought 6 of the sets as a side note, if you don’t need that many sizes, keep in mind that you can buy them one at a time, like a did for the large 18.6 cup boxes, I bought 5 of those, because that is what fit in my pull out shelf/drawer.
If you want to find the products I used and what else they have available, just click on the image below to see the project. These are affiliate links, I may earn a small commission if you buy them, but it doesn’t increase the price of the product for you
After finding these great containers, I knew that my first project would need to be my small snack pantry. It is (was) a HUGE mess!! This picture literally doesn’t do the mess justice!
The thing about our kitchen it, when it comes to organizing our bulk food, we actually have a large cold food storage room in our basement, and so I keep most of my actual cans and shelf stable foods in that space to make sure that we rotate things properly (also that we eat more of the fresh foods that we buy than canned etc) but we do have one main space for snacks and bread that we have literally piled high with, boxes, and bags, and, wrappers, and candy, and leftovers whatevers, misc galore, you get the picture right?. In essence it was your worst pantry nightmare. So, I cleared it out all onto my dining table (with a couple additions from the store) and if the pictures of the pantry didn’t look bad, now at least you can see that I am telling the truth, it was BAD!
Here is the deal, and this is where I need to get really real with you all. If this system isn’t so easy a five year old can do it (youngest member of my family), it will NOT stay looking good. I don’t want to have to reorganize my pantry every time I go grocery shopping. And I do not buy the same things every time I go shopping- so the first thing to go was labels. That is right, as cute as labels look on a set of matching containers, I do not even want to think about having to find a chalk pen or reprint or whatever every time I go grocery shopping. I don’t want to have the wrong thing in a container… – which means just absolutely no labels. But the beauty of the containers that I bought is that they are clear, so you can see what is in them, so you don’t need labels.
To get everything to work, we had to reorganize the drawers just a little bit within the cabinet. We used to have the cereal on the top shelf but I wanted them easy to get (AND easy to put away!!) so we put them on the bottom shelf, ultimately it will make feeding themselves breakfast a lot easier (if it is a cereal day).
Anyway, after cleaning through the GIANT pile of stuff, (we threw a couple things away and gave a few things away that we just weren’t using but were brand new in the package). We got all but a couple things in the containers. Want to see the afters?
I feel refreshed!!
I feel like you need to pictures me doing jazz hands as I show you this amazing space!!
On each shelf we had just a tiny bit of left over space, so we filled those where we could, with boxes that were either kind of cute OR wrapped in duct tape. But you can put them in the back of the shelf if you want- so that every time you open your pantry you feel the rush of beauty that only matching clear containers can provide!
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