My "Must Fix" Moment - Pantry and Counter Organizing

Posted By:  Stephanie

Do you ever have a moment when you look at something in your house and think, WOW I need to fix that right now!?  I do.  This week I have had a few of those moments and my sweet girl has been such a trooper and helper through it all.  One of the moments lead to completely emptying our pantry and organizing it.  Over time it had gotten WAY out of hand.  

After some time in the kitchen with my little helper it went from this.

To this.

Those black containers are the ones that I talked about in this post.  I wasn't using them in my craft room so I decided to take advantage of them in the kitchen.

I was so happy that I was left with the lower left part of the cabinet free.  I was able to use that space for some small appliances and to store some egg containers I'm saving for a neighbor that had been sitting on the counter and on top of the microwave.  The counter and microwave were part of this "must fix" moment.  The clutter was hurting my eyes and my brain.

Just behind the plastic wrap you can see a little white thing popping up.  That is one of the grocery bags that is stored in one of my milk jug containers.  For those of you who have been reading all along since I posted about folding my grocery bags and are wondering if I still do that, the answer is YES and I LOVE it!

I'm sure from these pictures you can see what my problem was, without explanation.  Yahoo, it's fixed!  Now I just need to have a chat with Will about the cover for the plug in.  Why oh why do we not have covers on any of the kitchen plugs?  Painting has been complete for a long while now.

Little Lou (on the left) had been so helpful and didn't complain a bit much so I was so happy to be able to take her to play with her best friend at OMSI.  Deanna, this cutie's mommy, purchased a membership for the two of them so we have been able to go as guests twice now.  So fun!  

The girls were checking out the fish, I love watching them interact with each other.  Adorable.

Have you had a "must fix" moment lately that you acted on?  What was it?

Tidy Tip - Organizing Plastic Grocery Bags

Posted By:  Stephanie

I have to start this post by saying, I know I really should be using reusable fabric shopping bags, which is also one of my near future goals.  In the meantime we use plastic grocery bags and re-use them for things like Will's lunches.  I don't know about your bags, but my bags were taking over our pantry!  I decided to go back to my middle school days of writing and folding notes and I'm very pleased with my very much improved grocery bag storage.

First I dug out all of my grocery bags and threw them on the kitchen table.  As you can see, we do a LOT of shopping at Walmart.  We get all of our groceries there because in our small town our only choices are Walmart and Safeway.  Walmart is a much cheaper option when living on a budget.  I'm so thankful for our new Walmart!

Lay out your grocery bag and flatten it out.

Fold it in half...

and in half again.

Start from the bottom and fold the corner in,

and continue folding into triangles over and over until you reach the top.

You want to stop when there's about this much left at the top.

When you stop folding make sure that your are at the part where you have a little pocket like this.

Tuck the handles into the pocket.

There you have it, a nice compact grocery bag.

I continued and folded all of my bags which took just a few minutes.

I took one of my milk jugs and made it into a container as shown here so that I would have a place to store the folded grocery bags.

As you can see in my first before and after picture it made a BIG difference in my pantry.  How do you store your grocery bags?