Organized Baking Cabinets & Utensils

One of my favorite blogs, A Bowl Full of Lemons, is currently doing a kitchen organization challenge. The last two posts were all about how to organize baking essentials and utensils.  You can read the posts here and here.  Of course, I have been trying to follow along with the challenge.  This weekend, I did a little baking cabinet and utensil organization myself.  My "baking" cabinets are underneath our oven.  Under our lovely, brown 1960's oven.  So beautiful.

In the cabinet directly under the oven, we have baking pans (cake, lasagna, cupcake, loaf, pie, springform, etc.), the hand mixer, measuring cups and spoons, mixing bowls and cake decorating items.

The cabinet to the right of this one is where we have many of our baking ingredients.  I keep them in a matching set of black canisters and some OXO containers.  I labeled them with Martha Stewart labels.  In here there is flour, sugar, powdered sugar, corn starch, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, light and dark brown sugar, chocolate (kisses, chips, baking chocolate) and a rolling pin.  

The drawer to the left of our oven houses some of our utensils.  The expandable drawer divider is by OXO.

On the counter to the right of our oven is where we keep the most often used utensils and knives.  My utensil crock is from Home Goods.  I am not fond of the magnetic knife holder, but my husband is the cook and he won't let me get rid of it.  We keep pot holders in the small drawer to the right of the oven.

And that sums up my organized baking area of the kitchen.  I am excited to see the next challenge on A Bowl Full of Lemons.  I will be sure to share my space with you as well!

Linking up to these amazing blogs!

My Labeling Essentials

Today I am taking a little departure from showing you an organized space or room.  Instead, I wanted to tell you about the labeling items that are essential to my organization and how I store them.  A few months ago, I became frustrated with not being able to find labels that I had printed out.  I needed a solution for all of my labeling essentials ASAP.  I picked up a plastic caddy from Walmart and naturally labeled it my "Labeling Caddy."

I gathered all of my labeling goodies including, but not limited to, tons of Martha Stewart labels (my favorite!), Brother P-Touch tape refills, double sided tape, velcro, mounting tape, string, tags, chalkboard cards, chalk markers, mini clothespins and fun-tak.  

Everything fit perfectly into the caddy and the caddy fits perfectly in the cabinet under my "desk" in our kitchen.  I plan to write a post about my kitchen desk area, but I will wait until I have it organized more to my liking.  

Also essential to my labeling, are my two Brother P-Touch label machines.  I am in love with these gadgets!  I bought them both at Staples during label maker sales.  In the cabinet they sit next to two small bins with a few other labeling/office supplies.  

I often use my laminator for labeling as well.  It also has a spot in this cabinet.  I keep all of my laminating sheets in a magazine file along with CD/DVD labels, larger Avery labels, return address  labels and labels that I have previously printed from the Internet.  

For Christmas, my wonderful mother bought me a Silhouette Cameo!  Awesome, but what exactly is that, you ask.  It is an electronic cutting machine.  It can do so much in the way of arts and crafts, paper crafting, custom apparel, vinyl decor, scrapbook layouts and what else, customized labels!  Yay!  It will be a long while before I use this baby to its full potential, but the first thing I plan to do is whip up some vinyl labels for bins, etc.  I am beyond excited!  

That about sums up my labeling essentials!  I couldn't be completely organized without them!  

Linking up to these amazing blogs!

Our Refrigerator & Pantry - Clean & Organized

Happy New Year everyone!  I'm sorry that I haven't posted in awhile.  With the holidays, I haven't had much time to do any organizing, let alone blogging.  Tomorrow begins the first full week of the new year and also the first day of my attempt at a healthier lifestyle via healthier foods and regular workouts.  I thought that was a good reason to get our refrigerator and pantry cleaned out and organized.  I forgot to take a before picture of the fridge and freezer, but just try to imagine a chaotic mess.  I told you, I am on a JOURNEY to an organized house.  I may love to organize, but that doesn't mean that my house has been organized from day 1 OR is organized on a daily basis.  Here are the after shots of the refrigerator.  Mind you, we do need to do a bit of shopping for said healthier foods.  This is after I took everything out, including all of the shelves, cleaning everything as I went along of course.  

The majority of our condiments, sauces, dressings and sandwich essentials are on the refrigerator door.

I recently bought some refrigerator bins from Bed Bath & Beyond.  I haven't really decided which purpose I want to give to each of them.  For now, I put all of the yogurt in a larger one.  The smaller one is holding canned fruits and opened baby food jars.

Our refrigerator doesn't have an ice maker or water system.  I hate hate hate that about it, but oh well.  We have a Brita water filtration thingamajig attached to our kitchen faucet.  We fill up this beverage dispenser with the filtered water and keep it in the fridge as our solution to the missing water system.

Our pantry is a set of two tall cabinets to the left of our refrigerator.  I long for a walk-in pantry or at least one that is more like a closet, but a kitchen remodel is not in our cards.  These cabinets are narrow and deep.  They are annoying in every sense of the word, but we make the best of it.  I find myself having to reorganize the pantry often.  It's one of the most difficult areas of our house to keep organized.  Here are some befores.

The usual first step to organizing a space is to remove everything.  I did just that and then wiped down the shelves.  The kids helped me by handing me the items to put back.  I used to have labels on the shelves for what I wanted to go in those spaces.  You will see that I removed them in the after simply because as much as I wanted the labels to work, they didn't.  No big deal.  Also, let me tell you about those 3 drawers.  Since these cabinets are pretty deep, I wanted a solution for at least some of the shelves.  Things in the back seem to get forgotten about.  I bought these Bamboo Roll-Out Cabinet Drawers from the Container Store when they were on sale awhile back.  They work great.  I really love them and hope to get some or similar ones for the cabinet that holds our pots and pans.

Then everything went back in in an orderly fashion.

On the top shelf, I have all of my Tastefully Simple mixes and dips, and a lone cake mix and frosting.  I also put unopened condiments here as well.

The next shelf is mainly for spaghetti essentials.

The next shelf has soups, sauces and our huge stash of peanut butter.

Next we have canned tuna and chicken, canned vegetables, beans and the "Mexican" essentials.

The first pull out drawer is a hodgepodge of sides, macaroni and cheese, salad toppings, popcorn and jello mixes.  This shelf is very miscellaneous.

The second pull out drawer is for all of our snacks.  Cookies, crackers, fruit snacks, etc.  The pro to this shelf is that the kids can easily grab their snacks themselves.  The con to this shelf is that the kids can easily grab their snacks themselves.  I also have a container of their overabundance of Christmas candy, but I keep that inside the basket on top of the refrigerator.  They definitely don't need to be able to reach that themselves.  I love the OXO containers for keeping snacks and cereal.  For whatever reason, I prefer them over the boxes that the food originally comes in.  

Last but not least is all of our cereal and oatmeal packets.  

I can officially say that our refrigerator and pantry are as clean and organized as possible.  At least for this very moment in time anyway.  I feel like if I keep it organized, that I will somehow be more willing to cook (my husband is the chef in our family) and eat healthier.  Wishful thinking, right?  

Linking up to these amazing blogs!