Kitchen cabinet and pantry reorganization

One of the things I decided to do earlier this year on my quest to reorganize and simplify my life was to reorganize our kitchen cabinets and pantry. My original intentions were to redo every cabinet in the kitchen, but I quickly realized that is a huge undertaking. Which is why it took me 4 months to even begin...! I did manage to reorganize the pantry and the cabinet that houses food. Eventually, I'd like to tackle the other cabinets, especially where we keep the pots and pans, but I'm not in a hurry on that one. I have more important things to do with my very small amount of free time!

So here's how the cabinet looked before:

Before

Not terrible, but very unorganized. All those cans were just thrown in there in no order, and you could never tell what we had on hand. Plus, every time I reached for something I had to move something else, which always led to a cascade of cans raining down on my head....not fun.

And here's how the pantry looked:

Before - I can't figure out how to rotate images yet...I'll figure it out and fix it later!



The pantry wasn't terrible, either, but it was terribly unorganized. It just bothered me every time I opened the door. As you can see, I don't have a lot of space to work with in there. The back of the door has some great shelving which is absolutely jam packed. I'm happy with it, so I left it alone. And the top shelf holds things like tin foil, saran wrap, and extra salad dressings and things like that. I left it alone for the most part, too. Mostly because I was lazy and didn't feel like doing anything else that day!

So, here's the after pics...

The pantry after (again, I'll figure out how to rotate and fix it later!)

The cabinet after

Other side of the cabinet after

I stacked all the canned goods according to type - all the corn went together, all the potatoes went together, etc. I was extremely happy with the result. Everything was easy to see, easy to grab, and easy to see when we were out of something. Same for the cabinet.

Of course, DH hated it. Mainly because he couldn't at first figure out my system of organization. He got used to it after a few days, though, and there was peace again in the house (haha). But after a few weeks, I started to realize that I, too, hated it. Mainly because it started to look like this:

All those chips bags on the bottom shelf drove me CRAZY! You couldn't even see the canned goods down there. And nothing stayed how I originally put it. It was just too hard. Plus, since the shelves are made out of wire, it was hard for the cans to sit on them. They were wobbly. We can't be having that! In the cabinet, I realized how hard it was to have boxes stashed behind the board in the middle. Things could hide behind it, and it was hard to wiggle the boxes out of there. So, this past weekend, I started over.

I knew it would make DH happy, but it made me happy, too - win/win!

Now, all the cans are back in the cabinet, but they're organized and easy to see and grab. We still have a lot of chips bags in the pantry, but such is life. At least they're not hiding anything anymore. I'm very pleased with the final result. DH was, too, when he saw it.

So the moral of this story is, don't be afraid to try something and then hate it! Even if that something should work in theory. The old Nikki would have left everything as it was after the first organization, because I was too stubborn to admit when I was wrong. I have learned to let go of that pride and stubbornness (most of the time! haha) and learn from my mistakes. I know reorganizing your cabinets and pantry is not a huge deal, but it can be hard to admit when you're wrong about even the most trivial things. So its a big deal to me. Plus, I got some nice lookin food storage out of the lesson. ( :