Pantry Clean-Up

A while back my cousin, Steph, wrote this post on organizing her dried goods in her kitchen. It got me thinking about all the cute organized pantries I had been seeing on Pinterest and other sites.

This weekend, I stopped thinking about it and got busy. (After I opened our bag of flour only to find those yucky little brown bugs all in it- ick!) I had finally had enough. I went to Marshalls (Homegoods) and bought 9 jars of different sizes. They were all $2.99-3.99 each. They each had a perfect little square indention on each side that I knew would be perfect to paint with my chalkboard paint.

I washed each jar, dried them, and laid them out on the counter (on top of a destructed Pottery Barn catalog of course, to protect our counter tops). 

I used some leftover Valspar Chalkboard paint I had from another project.

I did not tape off the edges since there was a raised edge around each square to keep me sort of within the lines. I started to paint these after I had had about 2.5 cups of coffee and was a little shaky so I probably SHOULD have taped them off, but at this point it was a little too late. I painted each one with a foam brush. It took three coats to get them exactly how I wanted.

Then I cleaned up the edges with an exact-o knife, filled them up and labeled each one with chalk. On the items that had directions or nutrition facts, I cut out the nutrition label and taped it to the back of each jar.

Here are the foods I pulled out of the pantry to organize.

Here is our messy, totally un-organized pantry before. This picture is from a previous post where I explained how to make DIY Pantry Doors. Our pantry was a seriously hot mess.

Here are my jars all sitting pretty on the pantry shelf. (Don't mind the "grits" that got a little messed up!)

Here is our after! Totally organized pantry. Everything has a home! :) yay!

A close-up of my $10 Antique store find from the weekend. I love this little box and it's the perfect size to store Hubster's frying/cooking/grilling supplies.

I also got this super-presh wire milk jug basket at the antique store for $12.

One more picture of pure organized bliss!