I Got Motivated!!!

Thank you to everyone for your sweet comments and emails about my last post. I'm feeling better, and even had a burst of motivation last night to finally get my pantry organized.

And I did!

It's not 100% where I want it to be, but it's a good solid start to getting my kitchen into an organized kitchen that will work with me instead of against me.

If you've been following for a while, you know that my home belonged to my grandparents before they died. So I basically grew up in this house. My grandmother was the kind of person who had a place for everything, and everything in it's place, even if it made no sense to anyone else.

When I moved in, I had a hard time visualizing any other way of storage and organization. Cereal was in the bottom cabinet to the right of the stove. Pasta and spices in the top cabinet to the left of the stove. Canned soup and veggies in the top right. Even my drawers were the same. But after three years of living in this house, I decided it was time to make some changes. Now, they may not seem major to anyone else, but they are huge to me.

Here's the pantry before:

And here are the other cabinets that are going to be organized. A lot of what's in them will be moving to the pantry.

I have a very large pantry, but it really wasn't set up in a way that made the best use of the space, so I moved some of the shelving around. It's so deep that it's hard to see what you really have. Perhaps the reason I have eight bags of chocolate chips, five of them half empty.

I took everything out of the pantry and the cabinets, and set it on the kitchen counters.

The cabinet is somewhat custom, as my grandfather installed it and didn't glue in or tack down any of the shelving. So it was all very easy to move around.

Here's what it looks like now:

I have a ton of Tupperware (I used to be a consultant), and I love my Modular Mates. I also used a bunch of $1 shoeboxes that were on sale at Target last week.

I still need to make labels, and I would really love to get rid of that ugly shelf paper and paint it...but I think that may be a little too ambitious for me right now. I'm just happy everything is in one place. I'm considering taking the doors off, since this is just a former laundry and it's closed off from the other rooms in the house. What do you think? Doors? or No doors?

Tomorrow I will be working on the rest of the kitchen. If I'm still motivated!

Special thanks to my bloggy buddy Gwen, who, even though she doesn't know it, inspired me to get busy with her sewing closet makeover. It's seriously awesome. I just finished Gwen's blog makeover, so stop by and check it out!

Do you want to win a FREE BLOG MAKEOVER? Enter the Blog Makeover Giveaway! Ends Friday (1/21/11) at 11:59 pm PST.