Ahhh Organization!

One of our New Years resolutions this year is to organize and get rid of the clutter in our house. It is so easy to accumulate things and start to throw them wherever. We kept saying "oh we should put shelving here," or we should get a tote for that stuff" but we never did it. Case in point: our soon to be nursery is a room full of junk. We are going to have to tackle that at some point. This weekend, we decided to start small with the pantry.This is the pantry before. There's a few issues going on here.
1. The big clunky wood shelves were taking up a lot of space themselves
2. The spacing of the shelves was not maximizing the space. We also couldn't stand up boxes of cereal, as you see on the top shelf.
3. The tallest shelf is the top, which was hard for me to reach
4. Our economical "Big Bag O'Dog Food" took up most of the space on the bottom
These may seem like trivial issues, but when you're in the pantry multiple times a day (which I have been more and more these days) it gets pretty annoying.So of course we ripped it all out! All the food got to live on the dining room table for a little while and we went to Home Depot to get new shelving. Here's my little handyman starting to install the new shelves.Here the end result. I am really happy with how it turned out. Here's the positives of this project:
1. More efficient use of space. This is the biggie. I put everything in and had plenty of room for after we go grocery shopping tomorrow.
2. It forced us to throw away all the old food that gets shoved to the back of the pantry. You know, like the half opened bag of tortilla ships from Halloween and the 2 year old lemonade mix.
3. It also forced me to organize my cookbooks and recipes. This was long overdue, as I had allrecipes.com papers strewn all over the pantry before.
4. I love the little baskets in the second picture. It nicely holds my pasta and our Luna/granola bars for easy access to snacks.
5. We put the dog food in a Rubber maid container on the bottom. This saved space, looks neater, and also keeps Miss Molly's chow fresher.

All in all, I think we had a good start to our organization. Of course we started with food, because that is very important to us. Now we just have the rest of the house to go!