Hi Everyone,
Every season I try to do kitchen clean-up. You know throwing out expired food, getting rid of bags of food that is half eaten or stale and re-organizing the pantry to get ready for the next season. Since baking season is coming up, I was in desperate need of a kitchen pantry makeover. First I must tell you, my Husband has been re-modeling the kitchen and I do not have a pantry anymore. He moved my refrigerator to where the pantry was and in the spot where the refrigerator was, it was a big blank spot. So for the time being we decided to put up some shelves until we could finish that part of the kitchen. So you must forgive my shelves, their kind of warped and not so pretty. One thing about having open shelves is that my food gets dusty. We live in the desert and I swear I could dust two times a day and it reappears. So I teamed up with the container store and OXO to help me organize my pantry and to keep my food dust free.
So my first accomplishment was cleaning the top shelf of my pantry. As you can see from the before and after pictures, there is a big difference. This shelf was a mess. It used to be my baking shelf, then everyone kept putting more and more stuff on top of it. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t find anything and made baking a nightmare.
What a mess huh? I emptied everything out, tossed a lot of stuff and told everyone to NOT put stuff on this shelf. The baking shelf even became a holder for mail, that is just not right! To organize it, I put all of my sugar and flours in POP Containers. These containers are amazing! They keep food fresh and with flat lids it makes it easy for stacking. I am all about conserving space.
I even decided to use a little POP Container for storing my bread yeast and dressing seasoning packets. Holds them perfect and keeps them from getting lost. Looking at this picture, it looks like my Knox Gelatin has expired. I guess I should toss that. lol
Then I decided to tackle the dreaded junk food cupboard. Lets just say that it became quite a mess. I found food that wasn’t even open that expired a year ago. What a waste of money. The reason I didn’t eat them? I couldn’t find them. And look, I didn’t even fill my POP Containers. That will never happen again.
To organize the cupboard I used the OXO Cereal Containers to hold my crackers. I know it’s for cereal, but it’s great for storing crackers and other oddities. Plus my crackers do not go stale as quickly. Actually they haven’t gone stale at all because we could see them and eat them! 🙂
I found the little POP Containers were great for storing opened items, like my almonds. I love my nuts and I hate when I open a bag of them and they spill out every where. Not anymore, now they have there own place.
One of my biggest things is cereal boxes. I don’t eat cereal, but I do use it for topping on my yogurt and for grabbing a handful for a crunchy snack. I have two boxes of cereal in one container and I even keep a measuring cup in it so I can scoop and measure it. That’s my calorie counting side!
You know the half open bags of chips and pretzel you may have stored. I open a bag, eat some and put it back in my cupboard and than forget about it. I had a small amount in a bag and I placed it on of the POP Containers and now I just pop off the lid and eat a few for my snack. So much easier and it’s cute too!
Here is a picture of my cupboard after I stored my POP Containers. So much nicer and easy to grab stuff. My family even likes them.
I really enjoy my cereal containers and I have a couple extra ones waiting to be used. I think I need to go shopping so I can fill my containers.
I have to admit I love the Container Store! It’s one of my favorites and I can go crazy in there with all of the fun ways of organizing. Did you know that for more than 36 years, The Container Store has been offering innovative solutions designed to save space and time. No matter how clean, neat and organized we are, you can always use a little help!
POP Containers are available at The Container Store locations nationwide or www.containerstore.com
You can check out my Wish List of OXO Organization Tools on my Pintrest page. There are so many great ideas there! Even one for opening jars! Who says I need a man in the house to open jars, not anymore! Check out my Pintrest page and see what I found!
Did you know that you can enter to win a prize pack worth $500, including your choice of OXO Storage & Organization tools (up to $250), as well as a $250 elfa gift card. The giveaway will run from Monday, October 13th – Friday, October 31st. Just go here to enter. Good Luck!
I really had fun with this. I spent a Sunday afternoon organizing my cupboards and two weeks later it looks the same. Yeah! I am so happy! Once my kitchen is done I can really put my OXO POP Containers to good use. I think they would be so pretty stored on my counters. Oh and you know you can use them for storing other things like art supplies, beads, bathroom essentials, and I use the spaghetti container to store my paper muffin cups.
Have a great week! Get organized and have fun with it!
Toodles,
Jennifer
Is there some reason my computer won’t let me enter this?!?!?
Sorry you have to put up with desert dust. We frequently have wind in my neck of the desert (Far West Texas), including at least a couple of months of dust storms. The dust is annoying, but I love living here, so I put up with it. Plus, nobody is giving me grief about dust on everything… 🙂