Cleaning Up the Pantry

As you will see from the picture, it was time to do some maintenance on the pantry, AGAIN.

When life gets crazy busy, my house seems to reflect it (which doesn’t help matters), so I’m thankful to have had some time this week to do some cleaning up and organizing.
I must say that the food you see in here doesn’t reflect our complete diet. The pantry holds more snack type foods than the rest of the kitchen does. We do have a separate cabinet for canned fruits, vegetables, soups and beans.
To get started, I took almost everything out so I could wipe down the shelves, and as I did, I checked expiration dates and for empty boxes. When I was done I had a pile of cardboard for recycling.

 

Also, these little turntables work well for viewing and reaching different items in the pantry.

I also moved some of the kid’s cereals and snacks down so they could easily reach them.

A little tip–save your old jars (this was from pasta sauce) to store beans or grains.

Empty coffee creamer canisters can be used to hold kids’ little crackers, like gold fish snacks or dry cereal…

After cleaning and purging, repackaging and recycling, this is what I ended up with…

Much better, and now I know what I have, and can find what I need again.

I still love my shoe bag on the door for keeping track of lots of little things that tend to get lost in the back or on the bottom somewhere!