Pantry Purge

God bless our pantries. pantry's. pantrys. food closet. 

They hold a whole bunch of my sustenance and I am very appreciative. I go to the pantry after a long days work, working out, taking a nap on the couch during the summer looking for anything to fill my belly. 

Here is what I see.

Slightly overwhelming, huh? 

So, I started researching. "How to organize your pantry." Everyone seems to have their own way of doing things, but here was my resounding result:

boxes take up a whole lot of space 

I made my own plan. Took bits and pieces from everyone and decided to tackle the job of organizing the pantry. Here's are the steps that worked the best for me!

1. Take everything out of the pantry. Of course, throwing away all the things that are expired or you know you do not need anymore (for me, that was "iced tea" K-cups I have had for 3 years).

2. Begin to group things together into clusters. I found for myself it was easier to have more groups and combine them later than to have a huge group that I needed to split up. (aka find 11 packs of gum that you had no idea existed)

3. Begin to locate some containers that would be good for food storage. I decided to recycle my "program holders" and "favor holders" from the wedding. I added those to some cylindrical containers we received off our registry and I bought one more wire basket on clearance from Target. 

4. Begin breaking down boxes. I definitely tested things out. Some things I thought would fit best, totally did not. It was incredible how many boxes I threw away. 

5. Put everything back into the pantry with clusters of "like" items. Thoroughly confusing your husband. (mine has been waiting for this post because it has diagrams)

6. Sit back and marvel at the amount of happy you feel in your... belly. And then go take another nap. You've earned it.