Ahh… the smell of exhaust from a yellow school bus. What Mom doesn’t love that smell!!! After 10 weeks of summer vacation, countless trips to the mall, expensive water parks, tons of movies and a few side trips to cooler elevations, the sight of that bus last Monday was like an angel.
Maybe it’s just me, but that’s my signal to purge, organize and refresh. When I was a kid my Mom called it Fall cleaning. We don’t actually call it that anymore. Maybe it’s because Phoenix doesn’t have distinct season changes. That’s beside the point. Getting into my car on the day the kids went back to school, a note dropped out of my daytimer. (yes I still schedule my life from a daytimer!) It was my torn and wrinkled Spring cleaning list and the things that needed to be done around the house. The only thing that wasn’t crossed off the list was *clean out the pantry. Ugh! What’s wrong with finding a can of soup behind the brownie mix anyway. I’ll tell you what’s wrong. You can’t find it when you want it.
So after dinner that night I started clearing off every shelf. I got rid of small appliances (at the time of purchase I couldn’t think of a life without them) whose purpose still eludes me. All the “use by dates” were checked and anything out of code went bye bye. I then organized by category. All cereal and breakfast foods together, snack food in an easy to get to spot for the kids. Then all pasta and rice items. Since I bake at least once a week, I need 2 shelves for all the baking items. With lots of tall canisters for sugar and flour I had the perfect behind the scenes hiding spot to put that huge bag of chocolate morsels that my husband swears is one of the four food groups. He’ll never look there . Getting rid of all the “junk” made room for all my cookbooks and the bulk purchases of paper goods. I realized that if organized properly, you don’t need a huge pantry. You can design an efficient one right along with your new Stone Creek kitchen. With pull out shelves, easy to clean surfaces and bells and whistles to simplify your life , you’ll have just enough space to hide your midnight snack!
If a new kitchen and pantry is in your future, let me help. My 2 hours of complimentary design service will get us started.
