The weather is BEA.u.ti.ful here in sunny Florida. It was a needed change from the chilly, snowy “spring” we’ve had in Maryland this year. I’m not looking forward to going back to the weather. 
As I mentioned before I left for vacation, I wanted to show you what I was up to while I should have been packing. In the past, I’ve bragged about how *ahem* opulent our kitchen is. I knew that if I showed you just how awesome our kitchen was, you’d be forever jealous of me and stop reading the blog entirely…and then I woke up from my dream world. 😉 Let me show you.
Here is my pantry:
Yep. That closet is my pantry. Please, don’t envy me. 😉 OK, really though, that’s it. It’s a pre-fab Rubbermaid or Closetmaid cabinet made of MDF. It’s about as spectacular as you’d imagine. It’s serviceable, but it has definite drawbacks, but since it’s a rental we can’t change, it’s what we’ve got.
Here’s the before picture of the top portion:
It’s easy to see the the main problem. It’s a black hole. What goes in, doesn’t stay where it should and usually crashes down on you. The spaces are at least an arm-length deep. Once something ends up way in the back, it’s stuck. 
Problem number two above: you can’t see what’s in there. There’s a small overhead light in the pantry/laundry area, but it’s not great and certainly not enough to illuminate the interior of the cabinet. That’s not a dark picture, that’s a dark pantry.
Problem number three (Below):
Supporting all of the shelves are these little plastic clips that are supposed to, in theory, hold them in place, only the ones in our pantry are all different and very, very brittle. When we first moved in there just weren’t enough clips to hold up all the shelving and on top of that the ones we did have were breaking right and left. 
Needless to say, I’d had my fill and by last week I was ready to fix what I could. So I ran to Home Depot and bought these little beauties:
These little things are metal shelf clips from Rubbermaid. I chose metal because I thought they’d be more sturdy and not break in 6 months under the weight of my stockpile. I was on a mission to replace the horrible plastic ones even though I don’t own this apartment. I have to live here and if that meant spending $12.00 on 4 packs of metal shelf clips, so be it. 
Next I bought two sliding basket organizers from Bed, Bath and Beyond. They were $20.00 each, which was a splurge, but they don’t have to be installed and we can take them with us when we go.
I emptied everything out of the pantry and wiped down the shelves. Then I created labels using some printable sticky name badges and scrapbook paper. (I’m not the “Scrappy” Housewife for no reason. 😉 ) The blue goo in the box below is sticky tack I used as a teacher. It’s great for mounting things non-permanently.
I purged quite a bit and then started replacing the items we planned to keep. Here are the labels stuck t the shelves with the goo:

Here’s the after of the bottom segment. I used one of  the baskets to store my baking supplies and hung my cooling racks on the insides of the doors using (of course) Command Hooks. They fit perfectly in the space between the door and the shelves.
Here’s an after of the top shelves. I used the other basket unit to store our non-perishables/dry goods stockpile and stored our pancake supplies next to it. All of our thermal food carriers are on the top shelf. And did you see what I did with the labels for the top section? Since I’m short and wouldn’t be able to see the labels from the top down, I stuck them on the top! Now I can see what should go where at a glance. 
There is only one section I haven’t really gotten to yet, but I only plan on swapping the placement of these items because we use the casseroles all the time, but not so much on the pizza stone or soup crocks.
Confession time: Do you ever just get so excited when organizing that you lose sight of what you’re doing and overlook something? Yeah. I purged so much and was feeling so proud of myself that I started hurrying to get to the “After” and uh, forgot to finish changing out all of the shelf clips. So guess what I’ll be doing when we get home? 😉
Enjoy the rest of the weekend and I’ll be back with more on Monday!

Author

2 Comments

  1. Ooh, I like how you labeled all those shelves! I find that labeling is a good idea as it helps the guys in the house put things back and find things in the first place 🙂 But you just went way cuter than I ever went with it!!

Reply To Robyn :) Cancel Reply