Kitchen Closet

Instead of just storing food and a few small appliances, my pantry had become more like a closet for junk that was vaguely kitchen related. I clean out my pantry on a fairly regular basis, but all it takes is one trip to the store for it to fall back into chaos. This time I got out my label maker and made tags for each shelf. I have a space labeled for breakfast foods, beverages (tea bags, lemonade mix, etc.), snacks, crackers, cooking supplies, mixes, and canned goods. On the top shelf that I have to strain to reach I put small appliances and extra paper towels. The floor has a couple of heavy things like the crock pot and the fire extinguisher.

Here is before:

One big problem I found in there was that of empty boxes. There was no way for me to know that we were out of "x" because the box was still in there. So I took out everything that was individually wrapped and placed them in a ice cube bucket (the kind that comes with your frig for no good reason). For the snack section I used a plastic box from Dollar Tree that is about the size of a shoe box. Now I know when things are empty and boxes are not taking up so much space.

And now for the after:

The last thing I did in there was to mop the floor. I didn't want to haul out a whole mop bucket and mop for this tiny area so I snagged one of the kid's sand pales and did it by had with a sponge and some Murphy's Oil. I even got up a paint spot that came with the house. One cleaning tip that came in handy tonight was that a pencil eraser will get up scuff marks with very little effort. Just remember to do it before you mop or it will leave kind of a dull spot. It is a little sad that the cleanest spot on my whole kitchen floor is in the pantry, but hopefully that will be fixed tomorrow.