Today feels like the actual first day of spring: people are out at the beaches, the windows are open, and the air feels warmer. Thus, it is the perfect time to begin spring cleaning, and although I’m a week late, I love Apartment Therapy’s cure. It tells you step by step how to make your home beautiful and comfortable and functional, and does it in just eight weeks. I’ve always tried to do the fall cure and never finished it because it ran into holidays when I was off gadding about the country visiting family. So when I noticed that last week was the start of the spring cure, I decided to jump in and actually finish this one.

Week Two: Clean your kitchen

If you’ve never done an AT cure before, I suggest you get a copy of the book and follow along with it. If you have done it before, or just want to take the next two months to do a little spring cleaning, you can follow along with me. Before you do anything, I do recommend taking a day or two and doing a thorough dusting and cleaning of floors throughout. Done? Okay. Moving on.

I’m always on a tight budget when I do this cure, and this year is no exception. The goal is to repurpose and reuse what’s already here, and buy from thrift stores, garage sales, craigslist, or flea markets for anything that’s absolutely necessary. Since I just did the fall cure, the kitchen has stayed mostly clutter-free and organized … save the pantry.

This is how the pantry looked last fall after the cure:

This is how the pantry looked last fall after I finished week two.

While it looks pretty organized here, there are some reasons why, while the rest of the kitchen remained organized, this eventually turned into this:

Things quickly deteriorate when there's no plan.

Over the last few months I’ve been buying some baskets and whatnot that I find if they’re cheap and unique, and I realized they were sitting empty, waiting to help me reorganize the pantry. It was difficult to keep the pantry organized before because, even though there were some containers and spaces for things, they weren’t organized in any meaningful way. Some grains were on one shelf, some on another, and packaged and canned goods were sort of spread out wherever they’d fit. So when something new came into the pantry, there wasn’t any clear place to put it, and it just got shoved wherever there was room.

By adding containers and giving items a place, I hope we can keep the pantry a little more organized this time.

Simple printed labels and a vintage candy dish (a Fiesta turquoise cream soup bowl, actually) help keep things organized.

The gym basket and the coffee tin were picked up at flea markets for less than $20 total.

Now, the two things that tend to get most out of control in our pantry – canned goods and packaged foods – have their own baskets. Does this mean that the pantry will still look like this when I start the fall cure, without any intermediate effort? No! Just like you (hopefully) maintain your refrigerator by cleaning it out frequently, check our your pantry monthly to get rid of anything stored there that shouldn’t be, like languishing foods you bought on a whim and are never going to eat, or things that are better suited to take up space in a storage closet than a pantry. Bottom line – treat the pantry like any other workspace and keep it clean and organized, and skip the mass-produced plastic bins in favor of vintage and recycled containers.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under AT Cure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.