Things You Can Do When You're Bored

Once again, I find myself flying solo on the homefront. Hubs and our Little Man are still in Minnesota. Would you believe that they have the nerve to ask to extend their vacation an extra day or two? So instead of coming home on the 1st or 2nd, it will be more like the 3rd or 4th of August. And Baby Girl is back at her G-ma's house for a few days. Her cousins will also get to spend the night there for a "girls' night out". I'm sure they'll do things like watch movies and paint their toenails. :)

So since it's just me and the kitties, I had to do something to keep away the boredom. I've got a ton of projects lined up that I told myself I would do while hubs was on vacation. He'll be so happy that I was able to check one of the projects off tonight!

Rearrange The Pantry

Our house has plenty of cabinets in the kitchen, but they're not very deep and a few are difficult to reach. I store most of our canning and dry goods in several cabinets in the kitchen, but space is still limited. (one of these days I'll have a walk-in pantry!)

One of our goals has been to increase our long-term storage supply, a tall order to fill with limited cabinet space. We've done a lot to try to overcome that challenge, adding a new cabinet in the dining room a couple years ago, and a matching cabinet just within the past month. The kids will be starting Kindergarten & preschool soon, so over the past few months, I've been stockpiling snacks and drinks for the kids' morning snack at school. Their schooling is all in the morning hours, so I didn't need to worry about lunch or an afternoon snack; however, I didn't know what our financial situation would be like come the start of school. So I decided to utilize sales ads and coupons to get a jump-start on getting goodies for the kids so we'd be prepared when school started. In addition to snacks & drinks for the kids, I've also stockpiled on long-term needs like cereal, canning and baking supplies, and snacks and drinks for hubs and I.

But after buying "a little here, a little there" it became obvious that I needed to rearrange our two dining room pantry cabinets. Hubs didn't know what was ok to eat now, and what needed to be tucked away for later. So that meant doing some rearranging. The plan was to put long-term stockpiled items in the cabinet farthest from the kitchen & living room, and to put short-term, immediate use goodies in the cabinet closest to the kitchen & living room (so we wouldn't have to walk as far to get a granola bar!). haha

I really need to get into the habit of taking "before" pictures. I didn't think to do this before pulling everything out.

I did manage to take one "inbetween" picture. I had pulled out about half of what was in this particular cabinet. Please ignore the paint cans in the bottom right of the picture. We're still in remodel mode of the dining room. Although we bought the cabinets, hubs reinforced the frames and has painted them to match our newly redesigned dining room.

The results?

Left: baking & canning supplies, long-term storage and goodies. Right: short-term, immediate use snacks & goodies

I was really shocked that I actually had extra space in the cabinets. I was storing some items on top of one of the cabinets, but was able to get everything into the cabinets that I wanted to get put away. I've got about 5 cases of bottled water that I need to find a place for, though. Right now they're sitting in front of the fireplace, and that's where they'll stay until we figure out how to add more storage to our small space. So for now, this was a good start in the right direction, and I'm pleased with the results.

Plus, it kept me from being bored!