I was glad to be able to join in with Monica and Rebecca's Restoring Order weekly carnival this week. To participate, you choose an area of your home that needs organizing or straightening and post before and after pics.
First on my list was to reorganize my pantry. So that was my project this week.
My pantry is a couple small bookshelves in my laundry room. Not totally ideal but it works for now.
I seem to never have enough room on those shelves but lately I have gotten really lazy and disorganized. With all my couponing deals lately, I was starting to just throw groceries on top of everything else when I brought them home. To get to anything, stuff would fall as I rooted through to find what I was looking for.
This really bugged me but yet I didn't do anything about it! This week, I'm happy to say that I finally restored order to my pantry!
I took everything off the shelves and wiped the shelves down with a wet rag. Then I sorted everything and evaluated the best way to go about reorganizing.
Throughout the process I discovered several things:
1) I had way too many processed items. This is not helping my goal to eat healthy and eliminate most items containing high fructose corn syrup and MSG from our diet.
2)I don't need to buy any more pasta, tomato paste or corn starch for a very long time. Thank you, coupons!
3)Buying basic food items instead of pre-packaged food items (even if they're free with coupons) would be a better use of my limited pantry space. For example: a box of Quaker instant oatmeal is only good for oatmeal for breakfast. A container of oats can be made into oatmeal or used for cooking and baking. Eventually I would like all my jars and containers of dry beans, fruit, oats,rice, etc. to be in my pantry. For now however, they're scattered throughout my kitchen and dining room, which is why you don't see them in this picture!
I filled a big box with items to donate. I did keep the Betty Crocker Warm Delights and brownie mixes. One must have priorities, you know!
A few items were rather old so I threw them out. Other boxes were opened so I put them aside to use up first. I found that I had several sample boxes of cereal, so I set them out to be eaten before we open any more boxes of cereal!
Lastly, I lined everything up on the shelves in neat rows. Much better!
**Visit Rebecca's blog for more Restoring Order posts!
7 comments:
Wow! You did a fantastic job!!! I hear ya on couponing creating excess ...it's hard to pass up a freebie! I finally had to boot my stockpiled tp and other non-food items to a shelf in the garage!
Great job! And what a blessing to have a good stockpile of food from those great couponing deals!
You did a great job getting it all organized. It always helps to be able to see how much you have of each thing.
Mary Ann, it look great. You did a great job of "restoring order"! My pantry is getting a little bare lately. I need to restock.
Thanks everyone, for your comments!
Rachel-
It is such as blessing to have so much food! Many folks can only dream of being so blessed.
Katie-
Yeah, I have all my personal care items such as shampoo and toothpaste on another shelf in another room!
Anna-
It is helpful to see everything. For instance, I had no idea I was out of tomato sauce and had so much tomato paste!
Debbie-
Thanks.:-)
WOW, what a difference! Great job! :o)
Wow!! That looks SO much better. Good job. I love organizing things. When things pile up it seems like I can't think straight. I always hate to get started, but once it's done, I feel so good about it and want to show everyone. I never want to show them before.
Post a Comment