The pantry that Pinterest could have built better: a reveal

 So you know, we moms, we sometimes have to fake it to make it, because it's just freaking hard to cover all your bases all the time. So we pretend we are what we want to be: the overly-crafting, perfectly sensory'd household, organic yet fun and spontaneous, and really realllllllly well dressed mom. With an organized home. Can't forget the organized home part.

On the whole fake-it-to-you-make-it-list item the only thing I maybe actually can pull off is the organized part. I probably look boring, but I love me some organized.

Anyway, I love our kitchen but I have to be honest in admitting that a great majority of our food is shoved, stacked, wedged into the pantry and designated shelves because we have no place to put it. Our pantry is small...tinier than a closet, and some of our shelves were sagging from the weight of the food. Since we coupon we tend to stock up and we really want to have an awesome food storage so we need a better place to store it all.

So where are you going with all of this, Concise Miller?

Well over Labor Day we redid the closet under our staircase. It wasn't being used for anything so it seemed like a great place to expand our pantry/food storage.

I like dark walls and I cannot lie. I like big shelves and I cannot lie. I like Nate Berkus rugs and I cannot lie. I like the new pantry and...yep I cannot lie.

We're still figuring out the organization part. We have learned not to put the glass spaghetti sauce jars on the bottom shelf. There was a very close call with a spaghetti sauce christening but thankfully a miracle interceded and there was no sauce on my rugs. (Thank you Saint Spaghetti!)

I do owe my child laborer's a big thank you for their tireless efforts spent in the throws of some big canned goods rearranging project of the "grocery store" (Rhett) and the constant taking of cans pineapple and green beans and making a trail up the stairs (Rad).

The cement boxes are actually planters that are holding all of Rhett's preschool goodies. Last year I tried just putting them all in a folder, but the folder turned into a disaster so the boxes seemed like a slightly more genius idea.

They looked a little flat so I cut some paint sticks and stuck them on with painter's tape and ta-da cement planters with paint sticks on them. Oooo....ahhh....

We do have one more wall (on the left) that in a few months we'll had a few more shelves to as well.

Okay! I'm finished.

Wait.

Can't forget the before.

Bow-chicka-blah-blah....