Winning a small battle in my war against clutter

I have a pantry in our apartment. Have I mentioned how much I loathe this apartment? How badly I can’t wait to move out? OK then, more on that later. Anyway.

I have a pantry in our apartment. As apartment pantries go, it’s huge, probably 8 ft wide and 2 ft deep. It has 4 shelves in it that run the length of the pantry, and then about 3 feet of just space. That just space always ends up being the ummm, “stuff catcher”. There is half a case of Sprite down there that I bought for illness, my sewing machine, 3 packages of ramen noodles, some empty food boxes, etc. I do have the potato bin in there, sheltered from light by the wall (although I will be moving that elsewhere since I got the dryer), and the fan, which, realistically, won’t fit anywhere else. The top shelf is also just a strange gathering of stuff, as I can’t even come close to reaching it. I’m sure Dh has some deep dark secret hidden in there, LOL.

Anyway, that 3 feet of just space down below has always bothered me. I do keep flats of veggies down there, but right now I don’t have enough canned veggies to store down there. I could buy those short bookshelves from WM to put in there, but they don’t hold enough, and I’m not making a set of shelves for it because we’ll be moving as soon as humanly possible. So what do I do with that space?

Well, I’ve also been buying those re-usable shopping bags from WM. I figure we go through, at minimum, 500 grocery sacks a year. Using those shopping bags is cheap (they’re $1.00 each) and will save thousands of grocery bags over the years that we use them. The problem is, I’ve found all kinds of nifty uses for them around the house. My sewing is in one, I used them when we had to evac, and on and on. Well, I just found another nifty use. They very neatly hold several pounds of food, which I can then stack, something like cans on the bottom, then bagged beans or rice, then lighter stuff like TP. I have now probably almost doubled the storage space in my pantry! And, at $1.00 apiece, I can pick up 5 a week, use some for shopping and some around the house. Ooooh I just have to love that. I’m thinking I may be able to figure out a way to use them on those top shelves of the closets that I can’t reach-leave the handles hanging over so I can pull them down. I could store extra light stuff in them, like paper goods or next size up socks or undies when I find them on clearance. I am so determined to get rid of the clutter in this house!

Thanks for reading!

In Him,

MTW