Makeover

We moved into our house a little over a year ago and we take on organizational projects little by little as time allows. This weekend, we decided to attack our kitchen pantry. We have a pantry closet with shelves where we keep our snacks and dry foods. I don't have a "before" photo, but let's just say it was pretty messy. Not disorganized necessarily because I sorted the food by type on the various shelves, but it was very cluttered. I have a slight problem where I buy things without really checking to see how much we have left. For example, every week I buy more trail mix at Trader Joes only to come home and find that we already had a completely unopened bag right there in the cabinet. We have an abundance of certain foods and all those bags don't really stack well, so they just look all thrown in there. Not to mention the baking ingredients. All those bags that are folded over and messy looking...yikes.

I was recently inspired by a few other bloggers and returned to their posts for inspiration. Check out Amanda's amazing pantry! I am super jealous of her gorgeously organized space as well as all her baking loot. If you're not familiar with her blog, she frequently posts about yummy treats! 

(These photos are from her blog).

I was also inspired by HEAB's post called Simply Ways to Organize. These canisters make her dry baking ingredients super neat and easily accessible! This photo is from Heather's post. 

I did some googling yesterday to explore options for organizing our pantry. We don't have a huge walk in space and we already have plenty of things out on our countertop, so I needed solutions for inside the pantry closet. 

I came across this youtube video and I fell in love.

Seriously this girl takes organization to a whole new level!

Yesterday after nap time, we headed to The Container Store.

I. Heart. The. Container. Store.

Anyone else?

Whether it's for classroom organization or home projects, TCS is da bomb! 

We got the elfa Door Rack and some Click Clack food storage containers and did some rearranging. 

Check it out! 

 I think the door baskets are my favorite part because it just removes some of the contents from the shelves so things have more space. And small containers just look neater in those baskets than they do all shoved close together in a clump.

I also love the food storage containers we got. I started to label them, but then I ran out of tape in my label maker. Boo! I've got all my dry baking ingredients on this shelf plus cereal and the basket on the end contains my pumping supplies.

This shelf has our snacks, which still look a bit cluttered, but it looks better than it did. I grouped snacks by type and put them in larger bins.

Here's a shot of the overall closet. I also got some storage containers for my pasta and rice, but I still need to arrange those upper shelves a bit more. 

It feels so good to work on organizing! I just wish I was able to get into my classroom and organize more this summer. I am welcome to go whenever I want, but bringing two kiddos in tow doesn't make a lot of sense, so I am pretty much saving all my classroom organizing until the week before inservice.

Do you have a thing for organizing?
What is your favorite store to purchase organizational accessories?