Hello A Bird & A Bean fans!! It has been quite a while since I have been able to write up a blog post. I really don’t do much crafting anymore, but I did get the organizing bug last week when I started getting the kids all ready to return back to school.
Who else jumps for joy when August rolls around and you can start counting down to the kids being out of the house and your hair for more than 5 minutes at a time?! I know it might sound a little mean, but if you have kids that are school age, you probably agree with me! The school year arriving again is like Christmas!
Our family situation has changed a lot since the summer started though so I knew I needed a way to make mornings easier and not so stressful. I started working 25-35 hours a week and it is a standing all day kinda job so I am always tired these days. Mornings are definitely not my favorite part of the day, but I try to wake up at 6:30 with my kids and drag myself out of bed to make sure they get to school/bus stops on time.
One of the biggest changes this school year is we used to qualify for the reduced school lunch and the kids loved eating hot lunch so that is what they would eat most of the time. Now that I have a job we make “too much” and now have to pay $2.85 per hot lunch. That seriously made my mouth drop when I found out how much it was! CRAZY! My husband and I broke the news to the boys and I got busy reorganzing the kitchen pantry to make breakfast and lunch making easier in the morning.
Here are a couple pictures of our little pantry before I cleaned it up:
We don’t have a lot of drawers or room for bottles in our cupboards so when we moved into this house we decided to utilize the pantry door with a wire organizer we got on amazon. We made sure to use wood screws to keep it attached to the door. It’s a nice feature if you don’t have a lot of cupboard space.
It is great to have a pantry, but this one is a bit small and awkward. I tried organizing with a few bins when we first moved in, but you can tell it still needs quite a bit of help.
I got these wire shelves from Walmart to help provide more space. I really love using them! The little bins with the lips were also from Walmart and I believe they are actually Refrigerator containers.
I always have a hard time with the corners. I never know what to put there and things just tend to congregate there.
Everything was just thrown in there randomly and it was very disconcerting when I finally decided to organize it all and I was taking these pictures. I don’t know how I lived like this for almost 2 years! Hah!
The floor area was huge and was just a mess! I’m a little embarrassed showing you these photos!
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I am very happy and excited about how it looks now though:
TA-DA!! It’s crazy how much a few extra wire shelves and containers from the Dollar store help make it feel more organized!
I reused a lot of the containers I already had in the pantry. I added the black ones and the small gray ones from the Dollar Store.
These two shelves are my absolute favorite. I feel like they have changed so drastically and it just makes me happy. Is that weird?!! The yellow containers I got from Target for half off. Woohoo! Gotta love when you can find affordable containers.
One of the other things I really love about it now, is that I have things organized by category. Food for the kids lunches, breakfast items, dessert type items, pasta and other starches, and chips and other big bagged crunchy things.
I hope you can find some inspiration to organize your pantry a little more. You don’t need to buy pretty and cute containers that will cost you an arm and a leg. I bought half of these for $1 each. Even the big yellow ones were only $2.50. Also, if you already have containers you’re using in your pantry, try organizing them by category and see if you can fit more items in them. Keeping items inside containers make everything seem more organized.
Thanks for stopping by today! I am hoping to keep the organizing posts coming every Saturday for the month of September to help with all those back to school areas that need an uplift! Keep an eye out each week for those posts. I hope you have a wonderful week!
Megan’s a full-time mom and a part-time professional photographer. When she’s not busy cleaning up after 3 wild and crazy boys and hubby, she can be found holed up in her craft room making things. She loves to sew, scrapbook, make cards and create. She blogs over at Crafty Meggy expressing her creative side in a house full of boys. She posts all about her crafting, organizing and cleaning adventures.
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