Organized frenzy.

I think I've mentioned a few times here how absolutely crazy my nesting has been in the past week or two.  I had it with Ben and Addie, and right around this time with them both, but I think this one takes the cake.

And I totally blame Pinterest.

How can you stare at all these gorgeous, organized spaces and not want yours to look like that, pregnant or no?

So I finally got to work, hit up some dollar stores for baskets and storage units, tore the house apart, sorted into piles and made labels.

The destruction that ensued during the organization process was, well, unreal, as documented in instagram pictures.

  

I'm still not totally done, but as I watch everything come together, I know how worth it this all was.  Hours of work, hours of shopping, hours of scouring Pinterest for ideas...it all made for one heck of an organized, pretty house.  And that makes this nesting gal happy.  

And exhausted.

Phew.

I'll share it all here because what would be the fun of getting this organized if I can't show it off, right?  I'll tackle a zone a day, starting with the pantry today.  

Our pantry looked like this months ago:

It was a hall closet (and a messy one, at that).  

This house doesn't have a pantry.  And I do a lot of bulk shopping.  Azure Standard Co-op is the only way I can reign in our grocery budget while eating healthy, so all those bulk items really needed a place to go.  One day it hit me that we should add coat hooks in our mud room and take advantage of this closet by turning it into a pantry.  

Hubby went to work on tackling this project and before long, we had a pantry!  But it was kind of ugly and disorganized and over time, just got uglier and more disorganized.  So I pulled every last thing out of the pantry, gathered up some baskets, printed off labels and wound up with this:

I've been collecting every last glass jar we've brought into this house for the past few years because I knew I  needed a good solution for storing all those bulk baking products, grains, beans, etc., that I get from Azure.  But I didn't want to shell out mega bucks for glass containers.  Although someday, when (if?) money is no object, I will own these and love them:

And these:

But for now, I really heart my canning jars and the purpose they serve.

I got most of the black baskets from the dollar store since I was not about to drop $5 a piece on baskets when I needed about 50 of them for the whole house.  Besides, the ones at the dollar store (especially Dollar Tree - these black ones came from Dollar General though) are awesome and perfect.  A few of them I got at Big Lots (like the blue containers on the top shelf).

I store some bulk things on the bottom of the pantry floor, like my Biokleen dishwashing detergent that I also get from Azure (I'm a brand pluggin' fool today, eh?).  At some point I'll get a pretty little container for that, but for now, just pretend it's not an ugly brown box.

I got the labels for free from the amazing blog, Sissy Print.  I edited them in gimp (I'm all about the FREE!) to fit my needs and I can't tell you how much I love them!  Labels just make me happy.  And pretty labels?  Happier!  Hubby totally rolled his eyes at me when I told them how happy pretty labels make me.  He's like, "Um, I'd take some masking tape and a permanent marker and that'd work for me."  

Silly hubby.

I also prettied up some of my bulk counter containers.

I got the big flour container at Target a long time ago, the sugar and coffee containers from Walmart, also a long time ago, and the tea container is just a random vase.  

Well, that about sums it up!  I couldn't be happier!  This project was a pretty long one when all was said and done since our pantry started out as a coat closet, but it was worth it times a million.