Conquering Kitchen Clutter: Part One

How was your weekend? It was a very productive one on my end and I took sooooo many pictures of my decluttering and organizing that I am going to split it into a few parts. Decluttering and organizing for me, is such a big feeling of accomplishment, but I was up WAY too late Friday night! It's one of those things though... if I get the energy when I'm not at work and the kiddos are sleeping, I better take advantage of it! It felt like I was nesting like I did before giving birth, you know where you have that feeling that you'll NEVER get another chance to clean or organize! Man, I WENT TO TOWN organizing this weekend. Whew! All I can say is that the kitchen is DONE! Woot Woot!

I started with the pantry. The above picture is an AFTER picture of the pantry. We are very lucky to have a nice sized pantry to store food items and small kitchen appliances. I went through everything, looking at expiration dates, tossing and recycling, trying to find ways to make things simpler.

 

 

On the top shelf I had a bunch of shtuff(yes I meant to say shtuff and not stuff!) thrown on the top shelf. I had a canvas cube to store big hefty storage bags and some zippered bags I use when I'm grocery shopping.I wound up pulling the cube out of the pantry to make better use of the top shelf. I put the grocery bags in the trunk of my car so I have them when I go grocery shopping. I just need to remember to always put them back in the car after unloading groceries after doing the grocery shopping. I put the storage bags in the baby's closet since I use them to put clothes that have been outgrown. It's a constant cycle!

The big cardboard box is what I was using to store baby food. U-G-L-Y and it took up too much space!

 

The blue receptacle is a recycling bin and it was overflowing with paper and plastics!

 

This is after some rearranging. I grouped similar things together, nothing special.

It was way after my cat's bedtime but he hung out with me until the wee hours of the night, through all my kitchen rearranging. : ) 

I found a medium size basket to store the baby food jars. It came out of our downstairs closet. It was holding junk in the coat closet so this is a much better use and the basket doesn't take up much room.

I rearranged the canned goods, stacking them in two levels so I can see the labels.

I didn't make any huge changes but rearranged to make better use of the room and it has already made such a difference!