Operation Organization: Kitchen Edition

I have been slowly purging and reorganizing my kitchen cupboards, I have no idea why, but this seemed like a great summer project. It.was.not. although I am quite happy with the end result!

We have a small pantry, which I am hoping to build out to have deeper shelves and a full door, rather than the small folding doors we have currently. There is a foot and a half of unused space  (where the calendar is in the picture below) and this would increase our storage space exponentially. I would like it to look something like this...

In the mean time however, before this project began it looked like this.

                                                             Ya, I know. Totally gross.

To start this project, I looked at every single item in there and purged 1/3 of it (mostly expired & unused items). Next, I planned what I needed in jars versus cans or original packaging and then I went shopping! Our Dollarama sells great glass jars with screw on lids so I started with purchasing way more then I thought I needed (but did). While these were running through the dish washer, I took every single item off the shelf, cleaned the shelves, lined them with no slip mats and rearranged the sizes of the shelves.

Then I transferred as many items as I could to the jars. Already, things looked so much better, I love seeing what I have at a glance and how much of it.

Here's me, mid purge when it was +35'c on my holidays, in my kitchen, with no air conditioning. Argh. This makes a wayyyy better fall project!

Next up was my large baking ingredients like flour. You will see in the before picture I had a monster jar. Well that monster jar held too much flour and knocked my shelf down a few times, so I tossed it and replaced it with 3 smaller ones from Target.

Once all the jars were filled and in place I bought chalkboard labels from Michaels (scrapbook section), sharpened my chalk with a knife and began labeling everything. It was/is so satisfying,  I am such a organization nerd.

For my jars and bottles I organized them by size and type, stacking up any doubles. I placed all the  bottles on a slant and spaced apart so I can see what everything is at once, without moving anything around.

TA DA! The AFTER!!

This is my favourite part of pantry!

BEFORE & AFTER SPLIT SCREEN

Side note: I'm sorry my pictures are not the best quality. I was going to reshoot the after pictures and maybe I still will, but the before are stuck being crappy. I need to move on from my iphone pictures #goals