Pantry Organization Part II

I finally got around to organizing the Kitchen Pantry. I still cannot believe how long it takes to set up a house. I remember when I was little I could find the play husband, set up the play house, take care of the fake babies and have it all down by dinner.
But one thing at a time and yesterday was the kitchen pantry.
First I we Lee installed the pull down racks (thank goodness because standing on my tippy toes was starting to hurt). They were really simple to install (for Lee anyways). Although we had to install one twice because we didn't leave any clearance for the door hinges and the rack would hit them when you pulled it down.
I choose these exact ones, first because of their price ($10) and second because they could hold more then just little spice bottles. These racks can hold anything from soup cans, to jars of pasta sauce, to a box of jello. They were too narrow to fit the big double cans of tomatoes and chick peas :(

I was able to install the little wire basket by myself, as it involved no tools :) I thought it was a good place to store our coffee filters and coffee. Because we don't often drink coffee, we only have a small bag of it on hand (I Love coffee but I have to limit my intake to once a week). So the little basket works great for that.

Lee is a big tea drinker, and I enjoy a cup here and there so we do have a lot of tea on hand. On the middle shelf you'll see a clear container labeled Green Tea, we buy loose leaf green tea and store it in an air tight container. And on the lowest shelf on the right hand side you'll see some tea bags in a clear container (from Ikea) made for holding tea bags. I love this container, it has little dividers inside to separate all your different tea bags.

I like to bake, sometimes from scratch, sometimes from a mix. So I have a dedicated cupboard for just baking supplies. I found that when I kept all the baking ingredients in with the rest of our food, I would be moving the condensed milk I use twice a year to get to the tea I use twice a day. So I picked the small cupboard next to the pantry cupboard and designated that "The Baking Cupboard".
Inside the baking cupboard I keep the Brown Sugar, the chocolate chips, the vanilla extract, the raw sugar, the brownie mix (yum).

There wasn't enough room to keep all the flour and big bag of sugar, so I made space in the Lower part of the pantry.
Under the counter is our lower pantry.  I store things that I don't need to get to everyday here. It's also the COSTCO part of the kitchen (if you shop at costco you need a costco part of the kitchen, a place where you store all of the "extra" food, because nothing at costco comes in a one pack). Since these doors wouldn't be opened on a daily basis, I thought it would be a good cool, dark place to store our onions, potato's, yams and garlic.

You've seen it all open, here's what it looks like all closed:

Organizing the Pantry has completely gotten me in the mood to empty out the rest of the kitchen cabinets and get to work. Can't wait to share :)