Organization Challenge Day 7

Welcome to day 7 of the challenge!  If you’ve missed any of the challenge so far, that’s ok – you can catch up anytime.  You can access the master list of all the challenges in this post here.

If you aren’t already signed up for this challenge, you can do so here: http://eepurl.com/EkqPz

It’s completely free to join and some advantages of being part of the email “group” is that you’ll be first to get notified of the new challenges, printables and there will be some bonus tips that will be in your emails only.

Today we are moving into the kitchen. You will probably only need your “donate” box today so bring that with you. We’re going to work on pantry storage. This is one area where we desperately needed to do some reorganizing lately. Stuff tend to get thrown in and then the whole thing is one big disaster. I made a short “before and after” video on how we organized our pantry. It’s a little embarrassing showing you our “before” look but I love how clean and organized it is now. And I’ll warn you, you will see our pig “Norman” in the video as he loves to wander over to the pantry to see if he can find anything yummy in there. This is real life around our house 🙂

Watch the video here.

Now it’s time to clean your own pantry. It’s amazing how food tends to accumulate in there isn’t it? How do we get all those cans of beans and stuff we rarely use? And why do we keep buying them?? Mystery questions….

My extra little challenge for you today is to see if you can fill your donate box with items to take to the local food pantry. It’s so great how people are so generous around the holidays with donating food items but the sad reality is this: there are hungry people living nearby all of us 365 days a year. They aren’t just hungry around the holidays 🙁 Our local food pantries need all the help they can get all year round. So let’s each take a box of items today, or maybe even 2. Don’t forget that they will take other items too: diapers, formula, shampoo, feminine products, shaving gel, and pet food. Don’t forget about the pets! If you don’t have a food pantry near you, most grocery stores have a place near the front of the store where you can leave the items you want to donate. Then they take them to the pantries.

Once you clear out your pantry with the items you are going to donate, arrange your other items into similar categories. I put all my baby’s food pouches together, all her portable snacks together. All my baking stuff is on one shelf, and spaghetti sauces, pasta and similar items on another shelf. Dried beans, rice, quinoa and oats on their own shelf. It makes it so much easier to find things this way and keep track of what we are getting low on.

I just want to add, that if you watch the video and notice the Baby Pouch storage racks by Munchkin, this is what I was talking about. You could probably make your own using wine glass holders. The Munchkin ones are great though and have really freed up a lot of space in our pantry.