House on the Left :: Pantry Overhaul

Hi!

Things have been crazy {as always} around here, and it's really had me thinking ahead to fall when the kid's go back to school. {more like dreaming and counting down....ha!}

There's a little list of things that I want to get organized and projects completed *hopefully* before life really starts to get busy with homework and soccer games.

One of the top projects is our snacking situation. I don't know about anyone else, but my kids would snack all day if I let them. It's a fairly big issue over here since portion sizes have gotten out of control and snacks have begun to eat up too much of our grocery budget. I showed a sneak peak of our new plan last week, and hopefully will get to share all the details with you next week.

Before a plan can go into action, though, organizing must be done. {and not just done, but done pretty, right??} Enter our pantry.

It's been a work in progress for a few months now, and this week I have finally gotten the bulk of it done. Wanna see??

Of course, we must start with the ugly. Keep in mind, this picture was taken soon after we moved in, so at that point, we would 'unpack' our food and just throw it on a shelf.

First things first, everything came out to leave a blank slate. So basically, for a solid 3 hours, it looked like our pantry threw up all over our kitchen:

{keeping it real! :)}

Next up, I gathered all our "organizing supplies" (misc. jars, baskets, and tubs I had gathered from the dollar store, thrift stores, and our own personal stash)

I had a plan to upcylce the pasta jars, but in the mean time, I just wrote what was inside on top of the lid.

While I was at the dollar store collecting anything I thought might be helpful in organizing this space, I stumbled upon decorative rolls of contact paper. You must know- I love me some contact paper. As a renter and lover of all things removable, I could come up with a hundred different uses for the stuff. In this case, I knew it would make the perfect (and cheap!) decorative backdrop for our pantry. In a perfect world, I would put beautiful wallpaper or paint inside, but since we still don't know if we want to buy our house, I don't want to do anything too permanent. So up it went, and in went the containers I bought.

Already looking better, right?? The thing on the door was a great find at Target and really increased our pantry space.

And this is how it has looked for the past, oh, four months :) Finally, I got my rear in gear, and fixed up some of the uglies that were in there. First up, the cheap, black, plastic tubs I picked up at the dollar store. I taped off the top and spray painted the bottom and then added some of the DIY blackboard labels I made.

This was one of those little projects that was so easy and the transformation was really just amazing.

Next up were the random glass jars I had been collecting. Paint for the tops, labels for the front, and voila!

Ready to see the results??

During the whole redo, Ollie stood ground in front of his wet food, like he was guarding it ;)

Here's a reminder of how it started off:

I am pretty excited with how it turned out!

Make sure to come back tomorrow for a tutorial on how I made the labels. It was such a quick and easy project, that I just know you will love it!

xo,

Rachel

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