Pantry Project!

We have a serious love/hate relationship with our pantry. I love having a pantry, but hate the use of space. The morons that designed our home decided it was a bright idea to put the hot water heater in there, which elliminates all use of the storage area under our stairs... BLAH! Anyway... we had still been using the sexy wire shelving that came in the pantry, along with a wire rack Jeremy had before we moved in.

I tried numerious times to "rearrange" things to make better use of the space, but it never worked out the way I wanted.

In THIS post I talked about how I bought lots of storage containers to use, and organize things. Good in theory.

Ex:

The crates were too deep & things just got lost in there. We would forget about the things we had and buy duplicates.

In came Honey & Fritz last week. She recently redesigned her pantry with the Elfa system from The Container Store.

BEAUTIFUL!

We were heading to Raleigh on Saturday anyway, so decided to make a trip to the Container Store. DISASTER! I will never go in that store again.... it was awful!!! We decided to check out Ikea's storage systems before we made any decisions.

So... Sunday- we went to church & then over to Ikea for breakfast & shopping :-)

$147 later, we had 3 shelves, wall mounts, brackets, 12 spice holders, and a rolling cart!!

3 hours later, our pantry looked like a grocery store!

I took the idea from Honey & Fritz to put the cart in the pantry with my mixer. It (and the juicer pictured) had been living on top of our fridge.... not ideal. Now we can just roll it out into the kitchen when we need it. The shelves on the cart are filled with baking stuff - flour, sugar, chocolates, oil, ect. I want to get some nice containers to house all these things so they don't fall when we move the cart.

The top shelf is kinda hart to see... but it holds our pottery barn beverage jars, cake plates, paper towels, and lunch boxes.

Middle shelf is breakfast items on the left, then sauces (liquids), jar items (peanut butter, salsa, ect) then canned items.

Bottom shelf houses all our snack items (in the white bins) and dry pasta, beans & rice on the right.... I want some pretty jars to put these in!

You can kinda see the fire extingisher on the right... it's actually sitting on top of the hot water heater.

 So, what's missing?

The microwave.

to the right of the cart, another shelf is going to be hung & the microwave will sit on it. :-)

PS.... don't you love that I own thousands of dollars worth of photography equipment, but routinly use my iphone for blog photos.... haha!

I'll take some better photos once it's all complete!

Oh.... and those spice jars.... see the aprons hanging to the left in that last photo? Our spices are going to be hung there! I bought one of those picture ledges from Ikea a while ago to go over my desk.... well, I just got a giant canvas print to hang over my desk, so the ledge will come down. We'll cut it into 3 sections and hang them on the pantry wall.... like this (far right!)

http://jengrantmorris.blogspot.com/

Check out Jen's blog for some great organizing tips.