Pantry Cleanup

I wish I could tell you that I got hit by the organizing bug and went on a mad dash of organizing and cleaning my home. But no. It was a bug that caused me to clean out our food cabinet (not actually a pantry), but not the organizing bug. 

Ants. 

Lots of disgusting ants. 

Crawling everywhere. In everything. 

Not appreciated. So I pulled everything out of the cabinet and did a little research online for some natural ways to kills ants. Nothing worked. These ants weren't falling for any natural tricks! 

So after calling out on Facebook to my friends and family for their ideas, it looked like Raid was going to be it. And just like the commercials show, they hate it. Good riddance. 

Unfortunately, they had crawled their way into boxes and even the peanut butter jar. I'm going to show you what the cabinet looked before I pulled things out: 

I know. No wonder why the ants came. It was a free for all. Terrible. 

So after I purged A LOT of boxes and who knows what was hiding back there and cleaned the cabinets from little ant footprints, I started putting everything back. 

I only purchased the wire shelves for this project. Everything else that I need to organize the food, I already had in my kitchen or in a closet.

I put some food items that were in bags into jars that I had purchased at the dollar store a while ago. I labeled them with chalkboard labels that I also got at the dollar store. No danger of anything crawling into those jars. 

Snacks went into a wire basket. I found a paint chip that I labeled and stuck onto the basket with a paper clip. 

Since our house is teensy tiny, our medicine is in our food cabinet. On the top shelf. Gavin obviously cannot get into the cabinet so it is okay for now. Cookies seemed like an obvious match beside the medicine because cookies heal any ailment, right? 

Let's get one more look at this cabinet with a before an after side by side picture.  

I can't believe I even let the cabinet to get that bad...Oh well. No more ants and I have a clean and organized cabinet! 

If you want to read when I organized my other cabinet (not too many in this small kitchen), click here. 

Happy weekend!