EXTREME PANTRY MAKEOVER ON A BUDGET!

To me, this looks like the Pinterest

pantry

of Natalie's dreams, but on a serious

budget

, does anyone else do that? Strategically place things in your refrigerator or on the shelves of your cabinet to make better decisions. I'm at the point where my brain is sick of watching. all of these things should be in a glass jar they should be in a plastic object they should be in a container seriously wait until you see this after I have never been more proud of myself on a decluttering project before this is really amazing Hello everyone I'm Natalie, welcome to my channel for another episode from messy to minimal.

This is the

extreme

decluttering series I've done on this channel since the new year, where I went through every room in this house and we were able to get Today we get rid of eighty percent of our family stuff, we go back to my

pantry

to do a clean and reorganize

extreme

. This time we're focusing not just on functionality, but I'm ready to dive into organizing them in a way that's also visually pleasing, but don't worry, I'm not going to run to the container store to spend a few hundred dollars on containers and new containers. I do things a little differently around here.

In fact, I'm upcycling and repurposing some things I already own and buying from thrift stores, garage sales, and clearance racks to keep it as affordable as possible and to be an example that you don't need all new things or everything. that you see on Pinterest to have a functional and dare I say beautiful. pantry if you have been watching pantry organization videos and I am just one of several and you are new here on this channel. I hope you'll subscribe if you enjoy what you see and for those of you who have seen the other episodes.

Leave this emoji in the comments so I can say hello. I always love to chat with you about where we are in our own minimalism or simple life journeys, but let's start in the pantry, which as you can see is also my laundry room. multipurpose space raise your hand if you have multipurpose spaces in your home and you need to get a little creative today we're going to get a little creative let's get started. My husband Weston and I were raised, uh, learning. that when you set your grocery

budget

, part of it goes towards stocking up on some dry goods, flour, rice, oats, that kind of thing or canned goods so that you have a little extra supply if something happens, like being postpartum like when I had my babies, I didn't want to go out grocery shopping as much and it was so nice to have extra food on hand or when I was going through times with my chronic illness and when the global pandemic hit and everyone was panic buying. and by cleaning out the shelves at our local grocery stores, we had a good stock of food, no one in our house went hungry, we were able to share it with friends and neighbors if they couldn't find what they needed at the grocery stores, and we were also able to donate some of the extras we had to a food bank to help those who needed it most.

This isn't to pat myself on the back or say look at me and how cool I am, it's to give you a real life is an example of what having extra food in your pantry can do. That's not to say there isn't anything in this pantry right now that needs to be thrown away. There are some things, especially like empty boxes and things that need to be thrown away. Just thought I'd give that little explanation. I have many international viewers. People from all over the world have different methods for stocking their pantries. Some people live week to week without judging that at all and I hope.

Don't judge me because this isn't excessive, this isn't wasteful because we're no longer throwing things away like we did before I did that other extreme decluttering in that other episode from messy to minimal, but now it's time to go. Through everything I'm going through for the first time in my life, I don't think I've done this except when we moved, I'm going to take every item off these shelves, this is not the method I used last time. The time I ordered here and I wish I had, needs some help here so thanks for putting up with me through the longer introduction.

I hope you enjoy hearing my mindset, my goals, and my plan to move forward and move forward. let's get everything off these shelves so we can have a calm, functional and well organized space in our pantry, trust me, save yourself the money, this is bullshit, this is how I feel about the current state of my pantry, I'm seriously tempted to take this door off its hinges so I can get in and out because oh this is driving me crazy I think I'm going to do it so if you guys are enjoying this video so far you can do it.

Do me a favor and like it, that really helps my channel a lot and helps me know what kind of videos to make more of in the future, so now I'm going to pop up here and take all this stuff. From here, I actually think I have some Christmas mugs in this bag too. It has to go down. Wearing a black shirt was probably a bad idea. Let me show you this little pile of stuff I'm getting rid of. everything I found in the pantry needs to be disposed of, a couple of cookbooks, I never use cookbooks, thanks, pinterest and youtube videos, and then this grocery bag that's not even completely full of empty stuff, we used all of them .

There are only two pieces of this bread left, like bags of chips that were completely used, so we have really reduced our waistline since we made the last mess, which I am very happy about and now it is time to start putting some . of these things back these are um the Anchor Hocking this is the one gallon one and these are the two gallon ones that I've had these I actually saved up the first year that Weston and I were married so these are over eight years old We have come to the understanding that these anchor jars are the best part of our pantry, they are the things that work the best, they are so functional that we can see exactly the inventory that we can buy in bulk and not have to deal with large packages of things and have wasted because of that, so when we realized that we just said, you know, we're going to convert everything we can into clear containers, preferably glass, so I started from scratch with my beloved mason jars.

I have a small collection that you already know. I'm at a thrift store or even like the clearance section at Michael's sometimes, especially before the pandemic you could find glass jars super cheap, they're a little harder to find nowadays, but I was lucky, I want to show you this. I've been looking for half gallon glass jars because I had a couple, but I think this will be the best size for what I need. I was watching at home with Nikki and she was talking about how she organizes herself in a half gallon. mason jars and after watching that video I thought yeah that's what I'm going to do so I went looking for them and they are very expensive right now with everyone at home trying to can, it's very hard to find these jars. jars um, but I went to a garage sale just a couple of blocks from me and I saw these on the side of the road five dollars for this package three dollars for this, so for eight dollars I bought ten half-gallon glass jars.

I've learned that even the hidden spaces in my house I value looking good, but I'm not the person who goes to the container store, bed bath and beyond and just buys 300 clear containers, it's just not my style, I don't believe it. it's necessary if that's what you like to do, you're going to do it, and doing it today is using glass jars and other glass jars that I have to organize this in. First I'm going to get these glass jars and a couple of other things I found at the thrift store to put in my dishwasher on a sanitary cycle, um, and then I'm going to put some canned goods back in the pantry and, in in a way, mapping out the different categories of where things are going to go. so we're back i just picked up the kids from school i took a little break from my organization liam what was the first thing you said when we walked in the door this is a disaster it was like what happened to the kitchen this is a mess, it actually looks a lot better than it did about an hour ago, i.e. it gets worse before it gets better and now I'm making good progress decanting items.

I'll show you what I've done so far so I have a bunch of glass jars in two sizes so far, the 32 ounce size, which is good for smaller collections of nuts and seeds and things like that, and then I have these half gallons . I'll give you a complete tour of the pantry and show you everything I have. Later, but I just want to give you a quick look at what's going on so far and I've got my anchor hooked. I think I'm going to buy another one of the two gallons, but I have two of those and then four. of the gallon ones that I'm adding to my growing pile of trash, which are the things that I ordered and showed you before and now I'm adding to the things that need to be recycled, packaging things like that as I'm converting to these jars glass, I suggest getting up and looking for a small drawer or a place or a refrigerator or something to tidy up while you look, so get up and refuse to do that.

I'm at the point where my brain is so When I'm done looking at all this stuff, I'm having trouble navigating through the different categories and what makes sense to group if it's in a glass jar, if it's in a plastic object, if it's in a bin and the interruptions from the kids are making it even harder so I think I'm at the point where I need to start putting things on shelves to get them out of this space and see what I have. Welcome to the second day of organizing the pantry. and reorganizing, so I took one of these little staggered steps here to stack things.

I ordered one from the target because I wanted to put it next to anything I could do to show them a comparison with the intention of just coming back. When finished or possibly finding a place for it, when the kids converted their two single beds into a bunk bed, we gave Haley one of the single beds and then the other one that was more worn out, we offered it to family and friends first, no one really wanted it. The thrift stores were closed at the time so I took it apart because I couldn't get rid of it and I'm so glad I did because now I've been able to use pieces of wood to make. different projects I built shelves for Haley's room with them and then other pieces of wood here.

I'm thinking about making my own tears just to lift the back of the glass jars I have here. This was a leg for one of the beds, so I'm going to find the softer side, I think it looks better although you won't actually see it because it will be covered by the things in front of it, so let's see if the jars of glass fit on top this is going to work, so I'm going to put the sweeter things on the back so I'm not tempted to open the jar and reach in and get some candy or chocolate chips.

Can anyone else do that? Place things strategically. your refrigerator or your cabinet shelves to make better decisions, these two aren't as tall as that one, these were just the final pieces that I cut when I was making the shelves in Hailey's room, so they'll create another level in there that works. Okay, and then we don't need anything for this lower level: crushed pecans and pistachios. I stacked things in this small one and it wasn't deep enough in each step for this size glass jar and it certainly wasn't deep enough for the large one. glass jars, so the verdict was reached.

Doing it for free is better than paying. I think it was like 16 for this, so I'm going to put this back in with the other three that they accidentally gave me and return them so there are other places in my. house that are affected by a disorganized pantry um and now that I have space there because I've reorganized things um I think I'm going to start transferring some things to the pantry that I haven't had there before, so I hope we can just store our spices more basic ones in the cabinet here on the stove and the extra ones, the mixes and things that he really likes and some of the things that I use on more rare occasions, like baking spices and things like that can find a home in the pantry newly organized.

Westin is here. Hello, do you want to help me organize the spice cabinets? I'd love to. So after cleaning out Haley's closet, she had one of these bins that she just wasn't wearing. Also, this is the perfect size to fit a few small appliances, so I have the immersion blender, a hand mixer, and a food processor that I only use about once a month and that are still enough to keep around, however, I don't need to keep them. I'm going to put them down here because it's kind of like an everyday access cabinet, so I'm going to put them in the container I grabbed from Haley's room.

Wesson just got back from Costco and Haley is helping us restock the sweet potatoes. I actually took out the sweet potatoes. from this drawer,I know you're not supposed to store onions and potatoes together, but we go through them faster than they can go bad, so they're fine for now and in this top drawer we're actually going to store some fruit because I hate having it in my kitchen for any reason. reason, so we found a solution there, good job, okay, enter it perfect, oh, okay, here we are seven days later, yeah, seven days since I started this project and I've been working every day on this.

I filmed some of it, just put the camera away, I was in my pajamas in the middle of the night here reorganizing and labeling, but I'm finally ready to show you the tour of my pantry now that it's all organized. and extremely neat and This took a lot of work and slow work, it was a lot of consideration, planning, renovating, relabeling and then ripping off those labels and trying something else, but I think we've landed in a really good place that I wanted to give to myself as well. a little bit of time to live in the space and use it and use the organization system to be able to show you what really works for us so it's been a week and I'm very happy let's take a look at the pantry this is a difference between the day and night.

I can't even believe this is my pantry. I love it so much and it was very affordable for me. It looks like the Pinterest pantry of Natalie's dreams, but on a serious budget, so let's go. Start at the bottom and these are our canned products and this system is working much better than that stupid can dispenser we had before. Seriously, that thing was horrible. I can actually see the inventory I have and arranged them as similar items. together, so a bunch of our beans are together, we have more Asian flavors like coconut milk and corn and water chestnut curry sauce.

We have a little tomato section here, a soup and broth section, as I showed you, we have our potatoes and onions. and then I turned this drawer into our hard fruit drawer so the citrus fruits and the apples go in there and then we go to the dry goods shelf and this is so visually satisfying to me, I love it, okay, start over on this side with our Anchor Hocking Heritage Hill jars, oatmeal and white rice, these are the two jars that we've had forever, the system we've used probably since we've been married and it's working very well, so we'll continue with Simply I put new labels on them and cleaned up the lids a little bit, then we have pancake mix and we mix that up, so I'll leave you with a recipe, just a Pinterest link that I found years ago that I just mixed up.

We lift it up and put it in this jar, then we have our Kodiak Cakes pancake protein mix which, as you can see, we need to buy more all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour behind that brown rice and one of the things I found at the store secondhand was actually This little scoop is a good dry scoop and I thought you know what would be nice to have in each of these things because for most of these items I just look at the quantity and I don't need an exact measurement. These are little five ounce scoops and I bought more on Amazon Weston and both since I implemented this, you know, we're always into these dry goods and it's made a big difference when it's time to bring out the pressure cooker. and grab some rice or oatmeal to make oatmeal in the morning and you just have that spoonful already there and you don't have to grab anything else from the kitchen.

I highly recommend getting individual scoops for your dry goods containers. This was a game changer. Okay, move on to. the dry goods in the glass jars, I'll let you guys take a look at this. I'm not going to mention each item individually because if you're watching other pantry organization videos, you might already be sick of it. um, but one thing I did want to point out is how I labeled the couscous. Have you ever seen Richard Scary's couscous, the great detective? I just had to put that in there. I had originally written the names of what was in these jars on the lids, but I thought it was better to have it printed so Weston could read my handwriting and I love my Dymo label maker.

I've had it for years in case you're wondering, I actually added a couple of these extra rods and bars to these wire shelves to reinforce them and add more support, I added an extra one here and an extra one here as well as this extra one just to make sure nothing falls over, there's a lot of weight in here now that we have more glass plus the weight of the food so I wanted to make sure we were as safe as possible and you'll notice I kept the heavier things towards the bottom so that if anything should fall or a child touch it.

You don't have to fall too far and you won't hurt anyone or hurt yourself when climbing up. We have our pasta section, so they're like individual bags of pasta. We have some Banza pasta. I have this special pasta shaped like a fall pumpkin. I arrived at Trader Joe's. In fact, I've recorded two days in the life or "do it all with me" videos since I started this video and I do a little tour of Trader Joe's in one of those, so stay tuned for that video. I also have more things organized. Inspired by that video for you, boxed pasta that we just keep stacked on the shelf.

This will be like snacks for kids on the go. My kids are obsessed with chewy bars and our favorites are the pantry ones from Target. Don't drop chocolate chips everywhere, I highly recommend them and then like I showed you, I saved a couple of these plastic dispenser containers, we have cereal in this one, I also have fish crackers in this one and I was running out of containers. white ones and I was really determined not to buy too much and these white containers are a little hard to find right now they are discontinuing them on target so if you find them some of them are on clearance and very affordable however , I knew I had some things around me. house that I could repurpose and use for this space, so I bought these at Michael's house months ago.

I actually had one of these on our TV stand that held controllers, Xbox controllers, headphones, and things like that, but I did a lot of decluttering on my TV stand. and I was able to consolidate everything into one little thing that goes inside the cabinet, so I freed up this basket for a bread basket and then I had two of these. There is the same type of basket in our school cabinet, but I was able to take what was in both and consolidate it into one that freed up another basket, so I like to add a little bit of that natural basket look here and I didn't have to spend any extra money because I had them on hand.

If you're looking to spruce up the look of your pantry again, you don't have to go to the bin store to buy all the new stuff. You may have boxes, containers, and things lying around that you can reuse or just swap out. I knew I wanted everything. white here to make everything uniform, neutral and sharp. I used to have a lot of black and gray so I was able to change the white ones I had in other places in my house, this one was under my bathroom sink so I changed it for a gray one and then I had a couple of these in the garage saving some things out there that it wasn't necessary to have something so uniform, so I was able to change things.

The boys saw that I had a pair of these in Haley's room. I ended up buying two more to complete the collection, but that's a lot less money to pay than if I bought everything new and duplicated the things I already have. We had next to the fish cracker dispenser, we have our snack container and I'll just throw out the extra bags of stuff that didn't fit in whatever container I was decanting into and leave it on top here, but we have things like you. You know, go squeeze or microwave corn chip cookies, those kinds of things here that have been working really well and then, um, like the sweet snacks that I put in here, so these are sweet chocolates, that kind of sweet, indulgent things and instead of calling them sweets, I wanted to say sweets, I felt like it was a little bit fancier when I was putting these labels together and by the way, I love these container labels.

These are also from Target and this has helped a lot, not only me but others as well. people in the house or anyone that's in our house outside of our family it's also helpful for me to know what's there in case I forget so the labels are a big help and then on this shelf I have our nuts and seeds here. and I decided to put the labels on the side of the caps because I felt like at this point it was easier to read, especially since they still cover each other because the levels aren't perfect, but I'm okay with how it was nice to not have to pay a dime. just penny to make them in tiers like this and the labels on the side of the covers work well for me and then we have a couple of these turntables that I actually bought them for. my refrigerator project and I only ended up using one that was much larger on the top shelf, as you saw we actually put a couple in the Westin supplement cabinet and I have one in our spice cabinet.

I won't show you the spice cabinet today. but it's actually in one of those do it all with me videos that's coming out soon. This is more about the pantry, but stay tuned for the spice cabinet reveal. It sounds really silly to say that, but this one is just for nut butters. I have like a little bit of nutella, Trader Joe's cinnamon bun, a little bit of syrup, a little bit of tahini and then this is like our oils, so we have coconut oil, mct oil, my beloved extra virgin olive oil from bertoli, our extra sesame oil, we have a couple. of these things that are already in the cabinet where we cook, they're like our extra broth and then we have our spices, so yeah, stay tuned to see what the spice cabinet looks like, but these are all the spices that we chose.

Hold on, these are not everyday spices, but we'll still use them regularly enough to keep things to refill our pepper mill and our salt mill, and this is one of those repurposed containers instead of going out and buying something new that I repurposed. a glass heavy cream container that I actually used in my coffee video, my fall coffee video, and I repurposed it for free for that. I have cooking spices here and baking spices here and then these are the things that I will refill in the new little containers that I have in my spice cabinet where I decant our everyday spices, so when they run out, I will go straight to this basket to refill them, I just have some clips on hand in case we have a bag that needs to be trimmed and then we have these baskets like I'm showing you small appliances that I pulled out of the kitchen um hostess I used paper plates and napkins and other little things to that.

We have our Christmas plates and cups in this container and then my baking utensils and some specific ones for baking. Supplies like food coloring and that kind of stuff are in that basket next to that basket. I have my extra empty glass jars and then this little wire basket for extra lids, so when I buy new things for my pantry and I need to add a jar or whatever. I'll go right over here, they're all washed and ready to go and then I'll go up to this shelf. This is new. I'm making this my entertainment and hostess clothing rack, so when I have people over, I pull out a beverage dispenser. or I need a teardrop for a birthday cake or a fruit tray or something I have on hand.

I used to keep all of this in the garage and I still have some of this stuff in the garage but I'm planning a uh from messy to minimal the hostess uses a neat video like closer to the holiday season so stay tuned for that that, um, but I have some of my favorites, like pieces of wood to serve as charcuterie or any sauce or cheese board, the ones that I have there that I'm finding. I rarely use my crock pot. In fact, I've been using my pressure cooker on the slow cooker setting more often than my crock pot, so I'm keeping it there for now and if not I've used it long enough to justify keeping it.

I could pass it on, okay, and that brings us to the laundry side of the room, since this is a tidy pantry, I'm going to save this tour for my Instagram, so follow me there if you want some. tour of how I rearranged this laundry room it looks so much better it's just a night and day difference from what it was before this little bin here is for the food bank that's local. I just found some things we're not going to do on our way. through some non-perishable and canned goods, some supplements that I will take there.

I actually have more things to add to this that I put in the garage, so we'll take a trip to the food bank, but that's it for the pantry. I think it actually turned out to be a much longer and messier episode than is typical here, but it was a great project and I hope you enjoyed having some extra motivation to declutter or something more minimalist and budget-friendly. Inspiration on how to organize a pantry so it doesn't just look beautifulbut also super functional. The total I spent on everything, whether at a thrift store or buying it new on clearance, was less than 45, which I actually went around and totaled up. how much it would cost me to buy the things I swapped, like the gray containers for the white ones I had stashed around my house, and it would have been closer to 300 if I had bought everything new, so I definitely did this on a dime and I'm very proud of myself, you guys already know that I'm not the type of person to spend a lot of money to make my house Pinterest worthy, so if I can do things on a budget and still have a beautiful and very functional house.

As a result I am a happy camper, you can see how excited I am. The game of cooking, baking and grocery shopping has totally changed in this first week of having my pantry like this and I am so excited for the fall season and getting into the holiday season to bake more and be able to access everything in my pantry and see exactly what my stock is and not worrying about physical clutter or visual clutter when it comes to planning and preparing meals and spending time with my Family, thank you so much for spending a small part of your day here with me on my channel.

I hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you are and I hope this video has helped brighten it up a little. Be sure to subscribe if you have. I haven't done it yet and keep an eye out for minimalist and decluttering inspiration in my next videos to make sure you don't miss them, click the subscribe button and the notification bell so you don't miss when I upload my next videos thank you very much for watching today's video and I'll see you later um