My Pantry Makeover

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This project has been almost a year in the making. At the beginning of 2012 I completely changed our family's diet. We replaced fruit snacks and Pop-Tarts with raisins and cranberries, totally shaking our little girl's world for awhile there. When we changed our diet our old pantry had to go. We weren't eating anything in there any more and it wasn't suiting our needs as a family. 

I am almost embarrassed to show you the before picture. Not only is it full of unhealthy foods, it is so messy.  I even spy an entire container of Valentine's candy in there. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted the pantry to look like, so I started buying jars. I bought all of my glass jars from Walmart for between $3-$5 a piece. Just when I had acquired all the jars I needed for my pantry, we moved. So the afters look slightly different.  

 and after!

 On my top shelf  I have a small apothecary jar with sugar and then three large glass cracker jars with whole wheat four, powdered sugar and brown sugar in them. My flour is in the large apothecary jar on the bottom shelf, because it is the only place it fits. I also have a small cracker jar full of my Cream of Whatever substitute and a small jar full of homemade Italian dressing mix. I use a half crate to hold my cake and muffin mixes. (I learned early on separating my family from their love of cake and muffin mixes was NEVER going to happen.)

On my second shelf, I use an apple crate to hold all of my pasta. I use tall plastic containers for my rice. We apparently like our rice in this house. We use white and brown rice, as well as Nishiki rice for sushi. I also keep cornmeal and two kinds of couscous on this shelf.

My third shelf has our snack jar with raisins, wheat thins and other easy to grab snacks. We have a half crate of popcorn and then two photo storage boxes. One is full of sauces, such as enchilada, I am slowly finding substitutes for all of these sauces and the last box is full of Crystal Light and lemonade.

I keep canned goods on our bottom shelf. Each canned item as its own vertical column. Starting with mandarin oranges by the flour and then working through the vegetables. We use some of these cans in our meals and some are emergency storage. My floor shelf is almost entirely emergency storage with large containers of flour, sugar and bread flour.

My husband's only complaint with my pantry was that he couldn't tell the difference between all the flour and powdered sugar, so we added labels made from this chalkboard contact paper. My friend Lu, cut them out for me as a Christmas gift and I added the to all of my containers. Make sure to prime them with a piece of chalk before writing on them. I used a chalkboard marker to label everything, to get crisper lines.

I love my pantry. My husband calls it the Pinterest food room. He thinks I am trying to make our house look like a Pinterest board. He may be partly right....

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