The Great Pantry Clean Out of 2012

Seeing all these organization tips on Pinterest, and reading a few articles about organizing the pantry in recent magazines - I decided my pantry was quite unsatsifactory. When I say "read" I mean "skim while ignoring Caillou on the t.v." Anyway. My friend Angie loves to organize, and offered to help me while our kids played. This was one of those projects that I did need a little extra motivation to complete. I would stand in front of the pantry, look at all the stuff, sigh, and figure I would get to it later. So it was great having a good friend help attack it!

 I put a card table in the kitchen and we unloaded shelf by shelf. I couldn't get over how many of the baking items had expired. I then remembered, Doug went on a baking kick either when I was pregnant or when Eli was very small. So we had all kinds of flours, etc. - which had expired in the last year or two. Makes sense; since I've been staying home, I've done more of the cooking - and I like to bake, I just don't do it from scratch like Doug! So I hadn't been using a lot of that stuff.

I'm kicking myself I didn't take a "before" picture of the pantry, because it was a hot mess. Here is the After.....drum roll please.....

Ta-Da!!! Ok, it's not the best picture. But it will have to do.

Here are some changes: the square basket on the bottom shelf is full of Eli's snacks. Lately he has wanted to pick out his own snacks, and I don't want him choosing Doug's fiber bars. I put "our" snacks higher up in the baskets in the middle. We had cleaned out enough stuff the bread basket actually fit in the pantry instead of being on the kitchen island. The biggest change was getting the recycle bin out of the bottom of the pantry and getting rid of all the plastic grocery store bags. We put that out in the garage and just a few plastic bags in the holder in the bottom of the pantry. Now hopefully seeing the bags all the time in the garage will remind me to take them to the store with me to put in the special plastic bag recycle bin there. Moved the dog food container to the bottom. Put a plain white trashcan with a lid outside of the pantry, for recycables - when it gets too full, we can empty it in the big recycle bin outside the back door. Angie started in on the spices while I was feeding the baby. I never (well, rarely I should say) ever look through the spices to see what has expired. There were a lot that had expired, and some didn't have dates. I looked online, and on the manufacturer's website you can put in the date on the bottom of the jar, and the city where it was made, and it tells you the date when the spice was manufactured.....

Can you see that date? 1998. NINETY-EIGHT. We figured these must have just moved from either mine or Doug's (or both) apartments when we were single, to our "together" apartment, to here....and obviously weren't used very much!!!!

Good thing we can recyle all those bottles!

I have to say, I love having a newly re-arranged pantry with all non-expired foods in it! Big shout out of thanks to Angie for helping!!!