Kitchen Cabinets and Pantry Part 1

Today I decided to clean out my kitchen cabinets.  I ended up stopping after just 2 cabinets.  The number one thing that I've learned in organizing stuff is that you have to set limits and do things a little at a time.  If you don't, you get overwhelmed by everything that has to be done.  I work in 15 minute intervals.  Today I did 2 with a break in between.  It was just enough to have a small miracle happen in my kitchen.

Let's start with the before picture.

See all the stuff crammed in there?  I don't really know what is there or really how I function with it that way.  All I know is, I'm tired of not being able to find stuff when I want to cook.

This cabinet is supposed to have baking things and quick stuff to make for lunch or breakfast (except cereals because the boxes don't fit in the shelves...one day I'll be remodeling and this problem will be solved, until then, cereal is in the pantry).

The baking stuff is in the kitchen because I bake all the time.  My son is gluten free (GF) and casien free (CF) because of his autism and I can't really do that diet without baking whenever he needs something.  Sure, there's pre-made stuff out there, but I can't afford it and I don't really want to feed him all the processed foods all the time anyway.

The GF/CF thing is important to my organization.  Why?  I don't have a totally GF/CF kitchen.  I have to make sure that the GF/CF stuff isn't with the wheat flour.  I don't want to contaminate anything.

The other thing that was important to my organization is my wallet.  I had to do this with containers and stuff that I already had on hand.  I just don't have the money to go out and buy a bunch of containers to make everything uniform and pretty.  This is where my pack rat mentality comes in handy.  I have a ton of containers.  That, along with the fact that I have Clever Container stuff in stock, makes me still be able to do this job.  Those containers that I'm "going to use one day" I'm actually going to use...weird, huh?  I will say that at the end of the year, when I've organized one area of my house a week and hopefully reached my goal of an organized house to be proud of, I'm going to have used or thrown away all of those things that "I'm going to use one day".  The day is now or it's gone.

Cleaning out all the junk in that cabinet was crazy.  There were things that had expired in 2007, mystery ingredients that were in bags but never labeled, and lots of stuff that I had no idea that I still had.

Want to see the "finished" product?

My goal in these cabinets was to only use containers that I could see if there was something in them and how many there were.  I hate it when I reach in to get something for the twins to have and only pull out one.  The Bin Pull from Clever Container as well as the Cabinet Cubby and Fridge Cube were awesome for this. 

I also tried to label everything as much as possible...until I ran out of labels.  It's on my to do list for today to go get some more and finish the job.  There's not many things that still need to be labeled, though.  I also found that I didn't have the right containers for everything and I'm going to need to order some more stuff from Clever Container to finish the job.  Fortunately, I just had an Open House this weekend and I still have not closed that party, so I'll get that order in quickly too.


So there you have it, part one of my organizational journey in my kitchen.