Pantry Project

Something that I’d wanted to do for a long time was to clean out, paint, and organize our pantry.  I knew it’d be a task that would take more than a weekend afternoon so I didn’t really want to commit to it during a normal weekend when I only had two days as it was to fit in the usual weekend stuff: sleeping in, catching up on TV, and socializing as well as my normal chores and exercise.

My Christmas staycation provided the extra time I needed to finally tackle the pantry.

I moved everything into the dining room, which was getting quite crowded with everything from the pantry along with the tree, present-wrapping supplies, and seasonal serveware.  The pantry, however, looked better than it had in a long while.

The walls were painted with builder-basic off-white and they had seen much better days.  I went out to the shed and looked through leftover paint to see which colors would work and which ones I had enough of.  I ended up using the color that’s in the upstairs hallway, which isn’t a color I would’ve chosen for either place, but it’s what I had available.

The slanted ceiling got a coat of the light gray that I used in the guest bedroom.  Without all the natural light, the color was darker than upstairs, but it still worked fine in my use-what’s-available plan for painting the pantry.

So you wanna see what the pantry looks like now that it has fresh paint on the walls, an extra shelf up high, and some semblance of organization?

The new shelf holds my ice bucket, some Solo cups, and a big glass container in which I put plastic utensils, straws, and napkins.  It’s my party shelf.

On the back wall, I switched the canned goods and my baking mixes so that the shorter items went up where space was more limited thanks to the slanted ceiling.

The lowest shelf still holds my crockpots and panini maker as well as extra powdered and brown sugar and a few other essentials like chocolate chips and marshmallows.

 

On the floor are my two bags of cupcake liners (divided up so one has the holiday-specific ones and the other has the general ones), my griddle and wok, my two coffee pots (and neither the McHusband nor I drink coffee), and my bag of Wallflower refills.

The shelves on the left stayed pretty much the same with just a touch more organization: chips and cereal, then nuts and crackers, then baking stuff on the bottom.  It’s basically Carb Central.

My flour and sugar used to be in a cabinet by the dining room, but it makes more sense for them to be in the pantry.

(By the way, if your power goes out and you need to use up your milk before it spoils, bring it to me and we’ll make pudding.  Lots and lots of pudding.  What you see below is not quite half of my supply.)

The garbage can is still on the left, but we added some clear contact paper behind it to protect the wall from whatever we may sling on it.  Jury’s still out on whether the contact paper will keep sticking.  We’re waiting to see if it does before putting forth maximum effort to get bubble-free contact paper.

So there you have it, WAAAAAY more than you ever cared to know about my pantry.  What I know is that it makes me really happy to look in there and see how clean it looks and how everything seems to have a place.  Organization’s generally more the McHusband’s thing than mine, but I do appreciate it.

Anyone else use some of their holiday vacation time wisely like I did?  Or maybe you made an organization or cleaning resolution?  Take it from someone who knows: the process may not be all that much fun, but the end result is totally worth it.