Pantry Organization Update: A Year Later

Hi Foxy Friends! Today I'm linking up with Shay and Erica for their Let's Look At series, see all previous posts here. Last year I decided to organize my life, one of those things was our pantry, see post here, it was a hot mess. Today I'm sharing an update, how it's going 15 months later.

I did a quick video for those that want to see my lovely face, or just like to see it on video, but down below is a picture breakdown.

Let's break it down a bit:

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Top shelves are for paper plates, plastic utensils and cups, along with foil, saran wrap and all those other kitchen things.

Next shelf is pasta, oil and things I put in these containers, highly recommend, they do take up space but keep you super organized. If we had more space I would put our cereal that we regularly have in our pantry, but alas not enough room. On the far right is extra storage, ketchup, pasta sauce, Sunflower Seed Butter.

Next shelf is cooking oils and vinegars and breakfast things. On the far right where you can't see is some snack foods I use in Baby Fox's lunch. Next shelf is baking things, candy for the kids (although the two seem to meld together these days), breakfast bars, and a snack lazy susan (I try to limit the snacks to that tray, besides the one up above where I put them in Baby Fox's lunch).

This shelf has baking things (brown sugar, baking soda/powder), next container holds stuff to make homemade frosting, and the next one has stuff for baking. The ground floor is a bit of a mess, but a somewhat organized one? It has wine (you can see that), protein shakes, gummy bears, and over flow popcorn I bought from Costco (need to stop impulse buying, no room!), and then there is our lunch bags to the left.

The door has more baking stuff, medicines and random food storage

And of course more random stuff. The bottom shelf is for the kids, they put what they want there, sprinkles and straws.

So there you have it, how I organize my pantry. How do you organize yours?

Linking up here

Show and Tell: About Your Home

Hello Foxy Friends! I realize that I have a few new followers so I thought I would follow Andrea's prompt and give you a small tour of my home. I've done a lot of these posts showing you what we've done, but here's a quick recap.

This is what our house looked like when we bought it...crazy right? It was a short sale and we got lucky! Here is my advise on buying a short sale, or just buying a house in general and here is my advise on what to do AFTER you buy a house! So here is the house we bought in all of it's glory.

First order of business was to paint the outside and get the jungle they called a back yard in order.

Much better....

Next up was the backyard, there was so much stuff back there that they had three full truck loads of trimmings...crazy right? Click here for the full details.

 

 

Ahhh, much better!

 

But then we lived there for a couple of years and decided that we wanted to renovate the backyard. The pool plaster was falling apart, it was a mess. Click here for the full renovation pictures.

 

 

 

In case you're wondering we decided to fence in the sliding glass door instead of surrounding the pool.

 

 

Next we had to paint every single wall, baseboard and door frame in the house. We got a quote to have it done and nearly choked, so we set out to do it ourselves....so if you need any tips on painting, I'm your gal. I have perfected the art of cutting into a wall and ceiling and covering up nail holes in baseboards. So much so that when our window guy came to do a final inspection, he asked who did the painting because it was so good. My advice, use REALLY good paint. It's like when you're painting your nails, if you use the cheap stuff it clumps and clots and doesn't flow, but the nicer stuff tends to hide your mistakes a bit more...same goes with wall paint.

From one one spot in our house we could see, Light Purple, Dark Purple, Blue, Brown, Red, Orange and Green...yep those were wall colors.

From the same spot if you turned to the right you would see this:

Yep lots of coloring happening here. It took a bazillion gallons of primer and paint, let's just say we ended up having to paint every single wall 4 times, 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint.

So we started painting and painting. Knowing we needed new carpet upstairs meant that we couldn't do that until all that painting was done, and we needed new stairs and couldn't get the carpet until that was done as well...so down the rabbit hole we fell.

But here I am standing in that same spot taking a picture of the new stairs...such a huge difference right? Click here for all of the remodeling pictures of the stairs.

Our master bedroom was light purple and dark purple...I wish I was kidding.

 

But in the end it turned out great, click here for that transformation. Real life, we have a slide and a small house in our bedroom...can't wait for the kids to outgrow it so we can get our bedroom back!

 

And then came the master bathroom, what a mess it was! Wall paper that wouldn't come off and a bathtub that wasn't deep enough to go to my waist while sitting. 

Attempting to take down the wallpaper, that small amount probably took us a good 10 hours.

 

The clawfoot tub is my favorite, those cheapo drapes not so much, but one project at at time, and since it works, why fix it before fixing other things right? Click here for the master bathroom renovation. And if you want to take a peak inside my closet, click here.

 

And then the kids rooms. Click here for more pictures of Baby Fox's room.

 

 

And of course Mini Fox's room

 

 

Then there is Mr.'s room that he wanted to have a really big TV in...and of course he's wanting it to be bigger...we finally got cable the day before the Super Bowl, exciting times. Click here for that renovation.

 

 

 

I attempted to hide the stuff that was on top of the table below the table, but I clearly failed, since you can still see all the kids toys down there, opps! We do try to keep this space mostly kid free.

That's Mr.'s office area back there, did I tell you guys he writes music? That's his "studio" back there, he has all the equipment that he needs to write the songs, record and edit back there.

The last room is the guest room, which we lived in for the first 5 months we lived here while we painted everything. Mostly it holds all of my scrapbooking supplies and a bed. Appraently I have no pictures of that room...woops. I do have some before pictures though, so click here. A full post for another day...perhaps it will make me clean out said scrapbooking closet.

 

 

And apparently I have no pictures of the kitchen/family room. Why I have no idea. Well in this pictures I'm standing in the kitchen looking into the family room/toy room/a tornado hit it.

 

 

And that's it for this house tour! I'd love to see your houses too! I definitely need some help in the decorating department...we spent so much time take the holes out of the walls that it is hard to put them back and do it right, it's only been 7 years and I still don't have anything on the walls...one day that will change, one day.

 

Linking up here

5 Tips To Do After You Buy a House

Hi Foxy Friends! Last month I did a post on how to buy a house, so I'm back with some more advice...on what to do AFTER you've bought your house! Let's assume that you've signed the papers, the inspection went great and you now have the keys in hand,yay! Congrats, welcome to home ownership!

ONE

Make a list of everything that you want to do to your house and prioritize. Rome wasn't built in a day, and either is doing everything you want in your house.  So make a list and try and figure out how much things are going to cost. We knew we wanted to change the color of our house, STAT. See that graphic up there...yep that was the color of our house...and that makes it look nicer than it was. So first thing we did, literally we got the keys and the told the painter GO! If you want more details on  what we renovated, click here.

Much better right? See all those boxes in the window? Yep that was our "blinds" for a good 6 months...haha! Our neighbor across the streets bedroom window faces this window and he could see our tv...so yep those boxes stayed there for a while.

TWO

Be patient, you have a budget, stick to it. I know you want to buy drapes and blinds for every window and decorate and fill every room with house, but most likely you have way more room than furniture...take your time, find the pieces that fit you instead of going all out and getting everything at once. We waited a YEAR before we got drapes in our room. We saved up and then bought our drapes...boy was it nice to have a dark room to sleep in.

Best day ever when he came to install our drapes.

THREE

If you can do it yourself, go for it, if you know it's above your knowledge hire it out...we know our time is valuable so we hired most of our renovations out, the only thing we did do was paint...and man did we paint. We went through 23 gallons for primer and 20 gallons of paint. We painted every wall, every ceiling, every baseboard and doorway. We did not paint the doors...that seemed to intimidating to me! We didn't get cable for the first 5 months we lived there, I knew if we had cable we would watch tv instead of paint...so we painted from the time we got home till dark. Great motivator to get stuff done!

If I never saw another paint brush it would be too soon. That being said, I know how to cut in between the wall and ceiling like no ones business, if you need tips just ask, throw that blue tape out, there is an easier way to do it!

FOUR

We took the Dave Ramsey Classes, read about that here and here, that being said we like to budget for everything, I can't remember where Mr. read it, perhaps it was in the Dave Ramsey class, but we were told that you need to save $1 for every square foot of house each year for maintenance. We've been in our house for nearly 7 years and this is very true for us. And even if you don't use it all in that year, you're going to eventually need to get a new roof, water heater breaks, etc. It's nice to have that little bit of savings that you know you can use and not have to worry of something major happening. When Mini Fox was 4 weeks old we got a slab leak, so we decided to replace our plumbing, which totally sucked, but you know what financially we had already prepared for it, so it wasn't a big deal money wise. That's always nice to know that. If you want to see what our house looked like getting re-plumbed...click here...it's scary, you might want to click away, hehe.


FIVE

Just remember that you don't need everything all at once. We really wanted to get our backyard redone, but figured while we save up the money to get it done, we would use it to see how we really were going to be using the space. Turns out what where we thought we wanted the table was not where it ended up because it was in the direct sunlight all the time. But had we done the backyard right away and not lived with it for a couple of summers, we wouldn't have know how we wanted it. Same goes for the house, use the space a little, it may surprise you how you end up using things!

OH and one last tip, buy small plants! They are cheaper and just let them grow! We bought the smallest ones we could, and it took a year, but it was worth saving hundreds of dollars to go the cheaper route, and what's a year when you're in your "forever" home? And space out the plants, they grow more than you think, ask the people where you buy the plants how far away you should space it, we totally would have bought too much had we not asked!

So there you have it, 5 tips of what to do after you buy a house! Hope these were helpful! And congrats on getting your house!

Linking up here