Declutter Project

It seems like I am always on a mission to declutter our house, but somehow we always have more "stuff". I have sold things at secondhand stores, made numerous donations to the coalition, given away items to people at church, had a yard sale, and organized drawers, closets, and other little things along the way. It's always such a relief when you can open a drawer or door and know where things are! It's particularly nice to be able to open a cabinet door and not have something fall out and hit you on the head.

So. Surely I am not the only person who has a pantry that looks like this:

Ack! I know! The sight alone is burning my eyes! I realized that maybe my couponing skillz are a waste if I can't even tell you how much of what we have in the pantry. I would go buy the mother load from a triple coupons event, give half of it to Fed By Faith, and still be pushing stuff out of the way in the pantry to fit what we "needed". So I made it a 24-hour project to organize our kitchen pantry, which is not that big to begin with.

The first step was getting Stephen to buy me shelves and install them on the doors of the pantry. We bought those from Walmart for under $20 - I can't remember the specific cost now. They are super easy to install and hold a lot of items! Once I was able to get multiple items off the shelves and onto the doors, I could really move things around inside the pantry.

Finished project: I have categories - breakfast, snacks, pasta, sauces, baking ingredients, box dinners and even a couple of boxes for "miscellaneous" items (Kool-aid packets, a few Butterfingers from a friend at church, etc.) On the doors are more categories - canned items, jarred items, jelly/salad items/other baking ingredients, created by my own discretion.




MUCH better! I will never be able to have a clean floor (although I was able to mop it for the first time by doing this project) because we will always store drinks down there I'm sure, along with some other items. But at the very least it is much neater. The shelves on the door are pretty overloaded at the moment but I'm trying to eat out of the pantry more often than I normally do, especially when Stephen is working and I can make something simple for one person out of there. I do realize Harris Teeter is probably going to have another special coupon event in the next couple of weeks... what will the pantry look like after that???