There was a problem in our kitchen. A big one. No, the dishwasher wasn't overflowing and the fridge didn't stop 'frigeratin. The problem was the pantry, and it's been a problem since we moved in about 9 months ago.

The house we're renting has a small kitchen. Not small, tiny. Ok, not tiny, it's miniscule. Have you seen a nice walk-in closet lately? I'm sure it was bigger than our kitchen. Not the point. The point is, the kitchen is SO small in fact that the pantry closet is not even in the kitchen. And the pantry closet is small. Well, not small, it's tiny. Ah, you get where I'm going with this.

Our pantry closet is in the laundry room adjacent the kitchen, and it's where we keep our "most used" items and anything that we need to protect from our curious kitties, so, breakfast items, snacks, most glass bottles, etc. Luckily, there are big shelves over the washer/dryer area, and that's where the bulk of our pantry items live.

Until today, that area looked like this:



Since we buy a lot of things in bulk or preserve them ourselves by dehydrating them, we ended up with all these plastic bags of things. Ugh! Let's discuss just a few of the myriad of badness that is our previous storage system:

1. Bags can be stacked, taking up less room, but once you have a mountain of plastic baggies, you'll never know how many of them actually just contain raisins.

2. Bags tear. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen and you only need one cocoa powder explosion to know that this system is defunct.

3. "Where are the almonds? No, not the whole ones - not the slivered ones - where are the sliced almonds? I know we have some... where... could... they... Oh, damn. I see them. Behind the dryer. Frak."

You see where this is headed, and we're headed there in a handbasket. Or, that's how I felt until I finally had the last straw this morning while preparing breakfast. Unable to find one of three bags of dried blueberries that I knew were on the shelf, I made a plan to rescue myself from this pantry of horrors.

I would have liked to invest in an army of vaccuum-sealed hard plastic containers, but our budget does not currently include such luxuries. However, I knew there was a pretty simple alternative. After a quick trip to BigLots, I set to work matching each bag (or pile of like bags) with the appropriate-sized container. A lot of items were already in containers, so I didn't bother to buy new ones for those things. I made a list of everything and whipped up some easy-to-read labels as well. (That's a free font called Stencil, in case you're wondering.) This way, we can not only see what we have, but we'll be able to easily see what we're running low on so we can add it to our shopping list. EASY.

And, I think it looks kinda cool.





Best of all? It didn't cost me an arm and a leg. I spent $10 on containers and used labels that I already had on hand AND I still have a few containers of each size left over in case I forgot something!

Next week, maybe I'll tackle the next shelf of fruit and veggies that I dried this past fall because right now, it's a hot mess, as you can see...