This week’s hot spot in Simple Mom’s Project Simplify was the kitchen pantry & refrigerator – basically : FOOD. You would think having only lived here for 2 years that my pantry and fridge should be in fairly tip top shape – in fact, I think I did this less than a year ago. But alas, I was disappointed to find a lot of stuff that had expired or that we were not eating at all.

Tons of stuff went – and because I’m basically the only person who cares if the pantry is meticulously organized, it was in dire need of an overhaul. And although its somewhat discouraging to know that I’m going to be doing ALL of this again two weeks when we move, I don’t really mind because at least we got rid of a ton of things that I won’t have to pack now. Including non-food stuff that I found buried in the pantry – like old baby bottles, dead batteries and even a harmonica!

Anyway, let’s get to the before and after pictures, shall we?

KITCHEN PANTRY

You can just humor me and say, “Wow it looks amazing, I can totally tell that stuff happened here. I know, it still looks a little crazy. I’ve tried to do the little baskets of stuff to make things look pretty before, but since I’m cheap that meant, “let’s put stuff in cardboard boxes” which made my husband grumpy. But trust me, lots happened here. Like the spice rack area – good lord, it was a little silly. I think we had 5 jars of chili pepper flakes, most of which were expired. Lots of doubles of things, lots of old things. Lots of boxes of oatmeal that nobody likes and thus nobody was eating. Ditto for tea – and we love tea, but we had a lot of tea that fell into the experimenting with new flavors routine.

Here’s a quick visual breakdown of what happened:

and

It might still look a little crazy, but in use, it’s working perfectly and that’s all that matters, right? And those potatoes will be eaten and out of sight soon!

REFRIGERATOR & FREEZER

So I threw away a few things that were old (or empty like the empty box of butter next to the new box of butter) but mostly I just reorganized, like moving the syrups and dessert stuff to the bottom (out of sight out of mind?) and some of the stuff we use more often to the top, like the mayo and ketchup and mustards and my favorite salad dressing.

Not much happened inside the fridge. I kind of just reorganized stuff for fun  – like, “let’s move all the alcohol to the this side of the fridge and put the milk over here – ohhhhhh”. I also washed our grapes and bagged all the ones that hadn’t died yet, because I meant to  do that awhile ago. Oh, I also scrubbed the bajeebus out of the shelves, so they were all clean and pretty.

The freezer didn’t have much inside that didn’t need to be there, but the organization was seriously haphazard so I gave it a good overhaul – and also emptied all the ice cube trays in preparation for the move – no need to refill any empty ones, we won’t be using any ice in the next two weeks. Now all the veggies are together and the meats are together, etc. None ice cubes have been taken out of the big ice cube bucket thing. Very nice.

You’ll notice the door of our freezer was nearly empty. I moved a few things here just to make it feel less lonely. The now empty ice cube trays are in the door, ice cream moved for fun – woo hoo! I moved our frozen spices and a few other small odds and ends to the door also so that maybe we’ll use them. It could happen.

And that, my friends, is all she wrote. 🙂