The Kitchen Cabinets

I was inspired this weekend (during the rain on Sunday) to participate in Tackle it Together from Young House Love, our cabinets definitely need it! I'm going to do this in stages because our "dry" food is spread among many (many) cabinets. For stage 1 I tackled our "Top Pantry" cabinets, they house all our pantry goods minus the cans, which are down below with the Tupperware.  They are also the source of those nasty little bugs and I was determined to find the source. Left is the before photo and right is the after photo!

This doesn't look like a huge transformation, this skinny cabinet is fairly obstructed by the fridge but we still use it for breakfast items and some little appliances.  All I really did here was move all the mixing appliances (there are: a magic bullet blender, a stick blender affectionately called the "boat motor", and a hand mixer) to the top shelf, arrange the non-cereal items in the middle, and the big cereal boxes on the bottom (they are the most used.  We really like to keep this right near the fridge so that the cereal is close to the milk.

The middle cabinet took the most work, I took everything out and went through it all.  Here there was a lot of "drink stuff" lemonade, ice tea, hot coco and tea, lots of tea.  I threw out anything I had before moving to CT (some of the "pantry" from my Amherst apartment was packed with my kitchen supplies and stored with them and when I unpacked them here they just moved into the cabinets with everything else).  I also combined some of the boxes of tea.  Everything we back in groups, bottom shelf drink mixes, middle shelf mixes (for soups and dips), and the top shelf stays the same with the French Press, coffee and can opener. This cabinet is also partially obstructed by the fridge so the stagger you see is purposeful as end of the middle shelf is hard for me to reach.

I used some wire bale jars that came with the house to store my single serving drink mixes, I really like them and use them a lot so if I forget to put it away it's a little more decorative on the counter.

The end cabinet still looks cluttered but now I know where everything is and things are grouped more appropriately.  The pastas, rice and grains are on the bottom (for easiest access for the vertically challenged, then snacks, then nuts on the top. I tossed about half of the different types of nuts I had that were past their expiration date and "feeding" the nasty bugs but I still have a good supply to make my own snack mixes.  They also gave me some ideas for things with almond crust or peanut candy!