Organizing My House: Kitchen Edition

Woohoo, the kitchen is organized!

I talked a couple of months ago about wanting to get my house organized, and focus numero uno was the kitchen. I obviously spend a lot of time there, and it was pretty bad. Here's a few pictures of the mess.

this pantry was probably the worst of all-yuck!

This has been a very slow project because I had this "organizational epiphany" right before the holiday season. I spent the month of December (in between christmas shopping and traveling) figuring out my game plan and gathering supplies. I probably spent waaay too much time on pinterest looking at an overwhelming amount of advice and ideas.
Last Saturday, I had absolutely nothing going on, and we were dog-sitting, so I spent the whole day going to town in that kitchen. I got everything in order and cleaned the entire thing. It looks great. Some of the cabinets didn't have huge changes, but overall it just feels so much better and things are easier to find. I even put labels on the bins in the pantry so Michael knows exactly where everything goes :).

I cleared off my counter-tops and put all my cookbooks up above the stove with the lighters and matches

 This cabinet mainly got cleared out and baskets were added to hold our dishtowels and vitamins

 Yay for an organized tupperware cabinet!

This used to house a lot of our small appliances and I could never find anything! It was one of those cabinets where everything fell out when you opened the doors.

 My spices were in rough shape and I had doubles of several things because I could never find what I needed. I found this idea from a blog and amazon prime sold them to me for pretty cheap. I think this cabinet door is my favorite area of the whole kitchen!

In the pantry, I added bins and grouped things together and labeled them. There was plenty of room, so I found a shelf at Lowe's that matched the others and we added it to the top for more storage space. I cleared all my small appliances out of a bottom cabinet and put them on the top 2 shelves of the pantry. The very top is for things we don't use very often, but still want to keep, and the shelf below that is for things we use fairly often, but don't want taking up space on the counter-top. 

I am so happy that I finally finished and how it all turned out! I won't bore you with pictures of all my other cabinets :), but here's a quick before and after of my laundry area that I cleaned up along with the kitchen since its in the same room as my pantry.

This is usually how it looked before (with dog towels up in that left corner when they were clean)

And now, its still a little crowded, but looks way better!

Alright, now on to the next project!