FALL INTO THE HOLIDAYS- KITCHEN PANTRY ORGANIZATION AND UPDATE

For the next month, I'm so excited to be joining some of my blogger friends as we prepare for the holidays (Thanksgiving is already less than a month away)!  The craze and busy-ness of the season can quickly turn stressful, so we thought we'd try to curb some of the crazy and try to get some things knocked off of our prep to-do lists early.  Each week we'll focus on a different room of the house, and pick one small project (ideally fairly quick and easy), to tackle in order to be more prepared as the holidays roll around.  Many thanks to our smart friend Lisa from Shine Your Light for coming up with this idea and issuing the challenge to get our homes in order!  This week we're focusing on the Kitchen...probably the most important room for holiday prep!  I decided to overhaul my pantry- cleaning it out, taking stock of what I have, getting it organized, and sprucing it up a bit.

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I checked my archives, and 5 years ago I freshened up my pantry with paint and a bit of fun detail.  It was a good little makeover, but since that time my tastes (and colors) have changed and I've found that the storage system I was using then didn't work well for our family.  Fun while it lasted, but I was past ready to move on.

So, I've been wanting to repaint this space for quite a while but just haven't done it.  It's not a big job at all, so I thought it would be a perfect project for this series.  

But first, before the painting could start, there was a lot of cleaning out to be done.  I mean, I clean out my pantry multiple times per year, so how does it get like this again?  #weuseit  #scarybeforephoto

I stated by removing a good bit of items inside, combining like things, condensing, and throwing out old and expired items.  Speaking of, I found 4 things that were expired, like 3 YEARS expired...how have those survived previous clean outs?  ;)

While most of the shelves were unloaded, I used some leftover black paint and a small roller to repaint the front edges of the shelves.  

While I was at it, I couldn't leave the "matching" stepstool without an update, so I sanded down the top to even out the polka dot edges, and gave it a fresh coat of paint too.  

I taped off the steps and did a stripe pattern on the stool while I was at it, why not??  

There is nothing more satisfying than pulling back that tape to find a perfectly clean edge!

Before I started putting everything back in place, I wiped down the surface of the shelves.  One of these days I need to put shelf liners down, but oh well!  I also took stock of what I had and may need before all of the baking starts.  I know I have plenty of paraffin for Bon Bons, Ro-Tel for Cream Cheese Sausage Dip, and mix for Iced Tea Punch, but need some stuffing for Squash Casserole and ranch mix for a Chicken Cheese Ball.

At this point, let me say that this "makeover" isn't your typical blogger's pantry makeover... no fancy matching, perfectly lined up and labeled bins and containers here.  ;)  Not that that's a bad thing at all, those pantries are gorgeous, but I've tried that in the past and it just doesn't work well for us.  My shelves have a strange layout and are all different sizes, so I've not been able to find uniform containers that are a good fit.  I've found that being able to tuck things in all of the nooks and crannies without the constraints of a container footprint maximizes my space the most.  So, here it is with a good clean out and a little bit of paint-

Combining similar items into baskets (baking items, snacks, salad toppings, chips, bread, candy, etc.) keeps them contained and easy to pull out when needed.  I found the black and white bins and the green baskets at Ross a while back.  I need to pick up a few more to replace a couple of plastic baskets that I still have in there.   I think the paint I used was semigloss from another project- sorry for the glare in the photos but it looks good in real life!

 My favorite Ikea straws are front and center, easy to grab (see other Ikea favorites here and here).

The Pioneer Woman Cooks  ||  The Pioneer Woman Dinnertime  ||  Betty Crocker Cookbook

The striped stool- I've had it forever and it still has it's "country" bones (see the heart cut out? Ha!), but it's a big improvement.

Three years ago right about this time we returned from a trip to London (trip posts here, here, and here) and after touring the castles, I was inspired to add touches of gold everywhere, like the molding on the pantry doors.  You can see the full post on our Kitchen Refresh here.

With that, we should be good to go through the holiday season, and then I'm sure I'll need to do this all again after of the baking frenzy is all said and done! 

Similar Gold Vase

I hope you're inspired to tackle a project in your kitchen that you can do ahead of time before the holiday rush.  Be sure to take a minute to hop over and see these other great ideas to help get your kitchen all ready for the season, and we'll see you next week with more holiday prep inspiration. 

Shine Your Light  ||  Simple Details  ||  Crazy Wonderful  ||  Less Than Perfect Life of Bliss  ||  This is Happiness

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