Cleaning Up the Pantry

Lately, I was inspired by this blog…  IHeart Organizing Pretty Pantry  So, the wheels in my brain began turning about how I could spruce up our pantry during this bleak midwinter season.  What began as just a little project suddenly turned into refurbishing the whole pantry.  So, last weekend my family had to put up with having everything from the pantry strewn into "organized" piles in the living and dining room.  You see I just intended to cover a few boxes and containers to hold pantry staples.  But, when I was looking deeper into the pantry I couldn't help but keep noticing the outdated contact paper that was coming off and the scratched up walls, which obviously hadn't been painted for MANY years, probably since the house was built in 1970.  So, because I couldn't stand it any longer, I began removing shelves and rolled up my sleeves to paint the inside of the pantry.  Here are some pictures of the pantry from about a year ago, when I had labeled things, but hadn't dealt with the shelves or the walls.

So, the first step was to add contact paper to more of my boxes.  See the before and after of some of those below…

But, wait, what is that?!  Somehow the shelves look different in that second photo.  And the walls look a whole lot whiter, too!  Yes, I freshened it up with white paint.  And, thanks to the inspiration from the above-mentioned blog, I tried to think of a new way to label my shelves.  I thought her idea of painting with chalkboard paint was a great idea.  However, I didn't really want to buy more paint.  But, then I thought of the leftover chalkboard contact paper that I had from my project when I made my own chalkboard.  Here's an older picture of it….

That leftover contact paper sat in the basement for more than a year and I always wondered what I'd ever do with it.  I removed the pantry shelves and ripped off, what I could of the old 70's contact paper and then added chalkboard contact paper just the front edges.

The only thing I had to purchase for this project was one more roll of contact paper to cover the tops of the shelves.  That only cost about $5.

How fun that I can now write on my shelves to label them.  The fun part about this is that it's easy to change out.  The bummer is that it's sometimes easy to smudge them.

Now, as much as I loved how uniform and well-matched all of the containers were in the inspiration blog, I realized that it is not realistic for me to go out and buying matching containers.  So, for those of us on really tight budgets, let's find things that we already have and just recycle them, by repurposing them.  I have figured out that they also look prettier and more uniform it you touch them up with contact paper, which is not expensive, and easy to clean up.  I did discover that it's not easy to cover containers that are not uniformly shaped around, like this butter tub. 

 But, I still covered it, nonetheless, because it was what was on hand, the right size and could be stacked. 

 I put my Uncle Ben's instant rice in it and taped the directions for cooking on the inside of the lid.

I also covered other containers that we had from containers that had held peanuts and snacks that we received at Christmas time.  I even garnished a small remnant to cover an ugly 70's style emblem on the orange tupperware container that we use to store our Asian rice inside.

And for those random packages of things that you need to lasso, I have found that old tupperware containers and those tins that you receive for Christmas and wonder what you should do with later on work well. Also, cardboard boxes, covered with contact paper, work well.

So, here is the final completed project.  I am SO thrilled by how much fresher my pantry looks.