January Cure: The Pantry

Day 4!

My pantry is in great shape. Last fall I signed up for a free 5 week course on decluttering and organizing the kitchen. Conquer Your Kitchen was great fun: and it meant I'd been through only recently looking for expired food and what not. So, today, I was content to clean.

This hodge podge of shelf and storage units in my basement (and opposite the laundry machines)  is simply wonderful. Everything is stored here. If it is in use, it's in my cupboard challenged kitchen, but if you finish that box of tea and need another? It is here. So are all the canned goods, extra cleaners and paper products.

Some shelves have lazy susans, most do not. It's functional. I feel no compulsion to prettify it or zush it in anyway.

oops, there's an errant can of chickpeas trying to escape!

Assignment #3 complete!

I am still working on Assignment #3: The Home Project List.

Cleaning and Decluttering the Pantry.

Woot! It is the annual January Cure.

We started with buying flowers (or a plant or bowl of fruit) on Friday and washing all the floors on the weekend. I didn't quite get all the floors done--but I plan to keep at it until they are done properly.

Today's assignment was to clear out and clean the pantry.

I really did not think I had time for this, today.


But I set the timer and tackled it with a cloth and a bucket of hot water, one cubby at a time.

On the thread at AT, I'd said the oldest thing I found was an unopened bag of rye flour from 2007.

Turns out, no.

Going through my little toss bag while writing up this post, I found a can of vegetable broth with a date stamped on the top.

April 2004.

ahem.


Here is my small pile of donations:

After 30 minutes I had just one cubby left to do--so I did it and called it a day.

I was motivated to keep going, to keep cleaning, but I had to go to work.
Oh well.

From the Weekend: Mom's Pantry

The school my nephew attends gifted my mother with boxes and boxes of food and household supplies. (My mother is raising my nephew. He turns eight on Christmas eve.)

I went over on Saturday and cleaned out her pantry closet of old, expired cans (most dated 2013) and put in the new stuff. (One whole shelf is just soup!)

(Sorry the pics are so blurry. I think my camera battery is beginning to fritz.)

She is so happy.

A Retrospective: 3. The Bathrooms, Laundry Room and Pantry, 2007-2014

In honour of my blog's eighth anniversary, I am taking us on a tour of the changes I've made to our house over the years. This is the third in the series. The last areas to be featured were the Passageways: Entrys, Hallways and Stairs, 2007-2014. If you want to start at the beginning, go here: The Front and Back Yards, 2007-2014


The service areas.

You don't see these areas very much on house tours! Not unless someone has done something stunning, of course. Not to set you up: but I haven't. Done anything stunning, that is. In fact, my downstairs bath is in need of an overhaul. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Pantry: At Last. and Experimenting on my Face

Dear lord, was it really Assignment #4?

I know I hadn't been ready for it when it came.

But I have done it now.

I have, actually, tackled this particular bookshelf which I call my pantry many, many times. I actually love this strange unit--a holdover from my childhood when it used to be stuffed with record albums. I've expanded it with closet organizer shelving.

It sits in the basement opposite my laundry area.

My goal was to re-organize it, declutter the old stuff and wipe out every cubby.

To be honest, it was daunting.

The first surface, emptied.

It took about an hour.

The oldest thing I found was a box of lemon pie filling mix.

sigh.

2004.

I'm not even sure how that is possible as I have purged the pantry more than once in the last ten years! Maybe I got it from my Mom? Maybe I just never looked at it?

I also found my stash of peppermint tea. I thought I'd had some! And it was just in time, too The largest package expires next month.

So, here we are.

Ta Da!

I also did today's assignment--clearing out the bathroom cabinets. Nothing too exciting there.

The wall cabinets in the bathroom downstairs:

These two cabinets are right beside one another.

The bathroom "cabinets" upstairs:

All that's left is my daughter's toothbrush. I don't know why she doesn't like keeping it in the cabinet.

The oldest things I found?

ahem, cough, ahem, those cleansers and moisturizers?

yeah, those.

dated 1996.

sssh.

(I actually put some moisturizer on my face to see if it was Ok. As it sat there and sat there and refused to be absorbed, I started to feel all weird. What if it gave me a rash or something? So, I grabbed some tp and wiped it off immediately. What was I thinking?)

I just may take that rack down.

Boom da da boom.

Project 20: Create Home in Pantry for Extra Bathroom Items

I'm almost embarrassed to post this. It was too easy.

I have two bathrooms and no drawers in either of them. The only storage available is the medicine cabinets. There are closets, though, fitted with shelves, outside each bathroom.

If you wanted an extra tube of toothpaste you could look in the medicine cabinet, or in the closets. I never knew where to find it or even whether we had any. It was ridiculous. When I created my Household Goods Inventory Checklist, I realised, again, that I needed to create just one place to look.

So, I did. First, though, I had to put this pile back on the basement shelves.

Then, I could find my little plastic "shoeboxes" hidden at the back. I ran around the house gathering up all the extra toothbrushes, floss, and toothpaste. Then, I labelled it and placed it on a shelf in the pantry.

Now I need to organize the pantry! (Again.)

The Pantry Clean Out

This nifty old cube ziggerat has come down in the world. It used to be dignified with long playing records inside its mod red, white, and blue cubbies. Now, it merely holds more shelves, flour, sugar, canned goods and a whole lot of junk. Welcome to my basement "pantry."

I stared at this monstrosity for a long time. I decided to remove the cooking and baking items I use infrequently. I was able to do that because the stars and heaven aligned and my daughter cleaned her stuff out from these two huge storage bins during Christmas break.

We also just purchased the black shelving unit at Home Despot on sale. (Hubs went back and picked up two more for the garage. Hooray!)

(Please ignore my "typo")

 

 

Tonight was garbage night, so these cake mixes from, ahem, 2010 are gone.

 

 

But who knows when I'll get this stuff to the food bank.



I managed to sneak in another lazy susan. I love these things.

 



And so, here we are, another kitchen project complete. Hooray! I've been itching to get to this one for a while. Pantries are just one of those things, I think, which will always need periodic puges and re-organizing. It's one of those Universal Truths like five year olds will tell knock-knock jokes and teen girls will occasionally over react to remarks they never used to notice. That's life. It's just the way it is.

Defrosting the upright freezer is next on my list. I may wait on this until the first weekend in February--the one before I do the Big Shop--there will be fewer items in it then. Hopefully the weather will cooperate with suitably freezing temperatures.

Linking to the William Morris Project at Pancakes and French Fries.

The Food Project

I have spent the last two weeks making up my menu for March.

(green = meatless; blue = pork or beef; orange = chicken; teal = seafood = only on sale!)

It's all part of the effort to spend less money wherever we can-- shaving down the food budget to as little as possible. It was a challenge, too.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I did research and found all sorts of new recipes. I consulted as many Mark Bittman tomes as my husband would cart home from the library for me and Leanne Ely's Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way. (I credit Ely with teaching me to cook!) I looked things up in google and I started buying bags of beans, then soaking, cooking and freezing them. I found out legumes, peas and lentils are also called pulses and that they are grown right here and in the province next door--yet the grocery store labels say they come all the way from China. Why? I've discovered how ruddy cheap cabbage is and I'm trying to cook with it more often, but not too often.



I decided, as a way of ritualizing our new way of eating, to clean out my so-called pantry.



So-called because it is really a shelving unit in my basement with a long and noble family history: it used to hold record albums in my parent's living room when I was fourteen. That should also explain its colour blocked colour scheme.

So, I washed all the cubies: it was really dusty. I removed two binders. They were full of magzine pages, carefully and patiently removed from years of Canadian Living Magazine and put into page protectors. I've never looked at them since I did that. It's overwhelming to think about them now.

I rearranged everything: but I didn't label the cubbies, though I thought about it. Things are changing. I'm not sure labels would be that useful.



Linking to The William Morris Project at Pancakes and French Fries. Thanks for stopping by-- I look forward to reading about your projects.

AT Fall Cure Days 5&6

Day 5: Buy or replace Eco-Cleaner.

All our detergents are phosphate free. I stear clear of anti-bacterial soap and everything except the toilet bowl cleaner is "environmentally friendly."

I recently started using micro-fibre cloths for window and mirror cleaning --they're wonderful!


Day 6: Floor and Surface Clean One Room

I had intended to do my bedroom. And, in fact, I may still do it tomorrow as it needs a thorough dusting and vacuum.

But, I went down to the basement to declutter and wash my pantry shelves--and wound up doing a surface clean of the entire laundry room --including folding laundry and taking it to the places it belongs. (I even put away some of it!)

Remember how it looked a few days ago?


I've been plugging steadily away at it.

And here is it as of tonight:

(sigh. A basement is still a basement.) I like Leena's suggestion of going with painting that back wall white, as indeed, the contents of the room are visually chaotic enough. I was also reminded tonight of an idea I once had to paint the rafters white too--since, if you look closely, it seems someone already started.

Unfortunately, my camera is acting up dreadfully. I don't have all my before shots--nor all my afters, neither. I do have a little from today though, just to give you a taste.

This is taken from standing at the washer and dryer--looking back at the stairs.
We keep recyclables here as well as items for the bottle depot.


We have a nice donation of old towels for the animal shelter all bagged up and ready to go!




And here is the pantry. It's is directly in front of me when I fold the laundry. It's quite soothing, all spiffed up!


(We've had that cubby unit since I was 14--at that time it held record albums. It is shaped like a ziggeraut with the cubes painted to accentuate that. I love it. I merely added some inexpensive "closet organizers" to the mix and now it looks vaguely like a well stocked tansu.)

Glad That's Done!

eeeew.

We had a tiny invasion from some cold shiv'ring "wee tim'rous beasties" this winter. I had containerized everything vulnerable and I had washed out the shelves; but there was one we'd left to lure the vermin and attention was long overdue.

Well, attention was paid and the shelves washed and reorganized. It really didn't take that long, but it wasn't pleasant.

In brief, then.

Before:


After:
(sorry, I hadn't noticed it was blurry until now.)

Tossed:

(about 5 lbs.)

Did you know there's no expiry date for cake mix?
Bit scary to think about, really.

(PS. The instant gratification of the digital camera could get very addicting!)