The water heater was here before we were and we have been in this house for 18 years. It was a real workhorse until recently. Then the water was only warm . . and only for about 20 minutes at a time. We started having to calculate showers, dishwashing, laundry, etc. So after much discussion and debating and fretting by me, Pete with the help of our neighbor changed out the water heater.
Awhile back we had our garage enclosed creating a laundry room / large walk in pantry and, beyond that, a very large storage room guestroom. Something you might not know about me is I am one of those crazy couponers – I stockpile something when I find an awesome deal. So the thought of something happening in the Water Heater Changeout causing water to gush and flood because I am paranoid about my precious foodstores gave me heart palpitations!
So I emptied half of my pantry. I boxed and bagged all the food and moved the shelves and everything into the spareroom. Let’s see the before:
So here are the messy before pictures. There were wire racks full of empty glass canning jars mounted on the walls at either end, the cart taking up a good chunk of space and even though I work hard to keep the metro shelves tidy (I use tiles as “floors” and lots of shelfy dividers and baskets and bins), it just comes off looking kinda overstuffed.
Soooo, you can probably tell I hit a couple of deals – the oatmeal was ridiculously cheap after coupons and the chips after the buy one / get one sale and the coupons were crazy cheap!
To the right is the foodstuffs and the water heater. To the left is the laundry center and the non food stuff – serving pieces, cloth napkins and placemats, kitty litter box, drawers with spin art machines (I have 3 – shuddup!), electronics kits (we have 5 – shuddup!) and other stuff.Yes, I have 3 feather dusters- my nice Flylady one (that no one but me is allowed to use!) and 2 others for the kids to use.
I emptied the food side and he replaced the water heater (awesomely, by the way! Nice to have hot water again!!) and the we put the shelving back and reloaded them- purging and rearranging. But then the laundry side felt unkempt. Can you see where this is going? I purged and rearranged that side little by little until the pantry feels so much better. I am happy to walk in there now.
Here are the after photos:
Getting rid of the wire wall racks and the cart freed up space for the vacuums. Purged and rearranged. There are actually *EMPTY* baskets! See!?!
To the other side- also got rid of the wire wall shelving and the plastic drawers, shifting the catbox over (and yes, that is a wicker placemat being used as a litter catcher). I labeled the baskets that I hadn’t labeled before and got rid of a lot of serving pieces we really were using once ever year or two. How the heck did I end up with so much paper product (have wayyyy too much paper plates and plasticware)
I labeled each of the baskets and went through them (ugH!). Cleaning the pantry snowballed into cleaning out the hall craft closet (post coming soon) and the house looked quite a mess for awhile. It is slowly looking better.
I am disappointed that my wall racks and shelfy organization bits have not sold on craigslist. Next project is to clear the flat surfaces – the island (there are 2 baskets of stuff awaiting “repair”), the diningroom bookcase (kid projects tend to fester there), the top of the scrapbooking cart (a microwave cart that hold all my paper gear – I moved it next to the table so I could clean it out and sort and purge but now the top is full of clutter).
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