Partial Pantry Update

So things have been slow and steady in terms of progress on the house.  We have gotten a lot done, but at the same time I look at what there is left that I want to do and it seems like it will never be finished!  (And, I am my mother's daughter, so I doubt our house will ever be finished per se.)  One of the first projects I tackled was the pantry in our kitchen.  You saw some pics in our kitchen tour, but that was hardly the half of it.  To refresh, here is the pantry from the outside:

Here it is with the doors open (we had already moved the door mat at this point or the doors wouldn't have opened all the way):

 

We keep our food items on one side of the pantry...

And cleaning supplies on the other:

 

As you can see, neither side was especially neat or organized.  The first step was to take everything out of both sides and clean the shelves and the floor. While I was working on that, Mr. B took off the wooden pantry doors (let me know if you have creative ideas to reuse those doors!).  I used plastic storage bins from Ikea to hold like items, canned goods in one, baking supplies in another, etc.  For all of my baking goodies, I  made an essentials box with things like baking soda and salt (things I use in most baking projects) and a couple of other specialized boxes for things like espresso powder and peppermint extract.  I figure this way when I bake, I can just pull out the essentials box each time.  I used plastic food storage containers (again from Ikea) to house ingredients like flour and powdered sugar.

Here is the organized food side:

For the cleaning supplies, I used green plastic boxes that I found at Wal-Mart.  I again grouped like items, one box for general cleaning, one box for puppy supplies, etc.  And here is the organized cleaning supplies side:

We still have some work to do in the pantry, mainly painting where we took down the doors and hanging some sort of covering, but it is already a million times better than it was, and honestly, this part of the process did not take all that long and has made such a huge difference in day-to-day kitchen life!  Stay tuned for more updates!