Pantry Makeover

I have a confession to make. I'm officially obsessed with Pinterest. There are so many great ideas, and I always love a good reason to get creative. This weekend I decided to have a Pinterest project day and get a bunch of fun things done around the house. First up was re-organizing my pantry. I'm a pretty organized person, so my cluttered pantry had been getting to me.

I know. Embarrassing, right?

I looked up some ideas on Pinterest, and ended up coming across this blog. She has so many good suggestions on ways to organize everything. I wish I had a pantry as big as hers, but I don't so I knew I wouldn't be able to use most of the ideas. I decided it was time to make a trip to Walmart and see what type of supplies I could come up with.

Some of the items ended up not working out, and some are for other fun projects I have planned (stay tuned hehe). My first step was to take everything out of the pantry. My goodness, there was a LOT to go through.

Buster says "hi!"

I ended up decided on some stacking baskets and two tiered spice racks. After organizing all of my food, I used the spice racks for my canned food and sauces. I absolutely LOVE how it turned out. My favorite part is that the top rack is tall enough to slide extra cans under. Hidden storage - score!

Next I used the stacking baskets to organize all of my boxed food and pastas. There was just enough space on the side for my cereal, some snacks, and bread. Another good find! Everything fits really well. I have another storage area in my laundry room for extra boxed food. It's nice to just have one or two of each type out at a time.

Next up was a trip to Big Lots to get some containers and Lowes for chalkboard paint. Another thing I learned on Pinterest is that you can put chalkboard paint on just about anything. I bought some great containers and got to work taping squares on them to make labels.

I'm a little OCD when it comes to projects like this, so taping the labels took me quite a while. Eventually it was time to paint. I learned that it probably would have been better to use a thinner brush to help control the dripping. I also learned that I should have been more patient in between coats...

Being patient in between coats probably would have made the paint turn out a little more even. What can I say...I was anxious to see my entire pantry in action!

I also learned that I am VERY bad at staying inside of the lines of the tape. Apparently being anxious equals bumpy paint AND another whole day to scrape off the messy sides with a butter knife. Oops! In the end they turned out amazing though.

I love it regardless! So here is the final product. I have all of the sweets at the very top (where I can't reach them easily, which is always good). Then I have the containers I made with some boxed items we don't use very often hidden behind them (things like pancake mix, cornstarch, etc.) Next I have my canned goods, oils, and sauces. At eye level I have my boxed items, pasta, bread, and cereal.

And then at the very bottom I have a little three drawer organizer (that I bought when we first moved in). It has my herbs and spices, spice packets, and bags in it. See, at least I had PART of the pantry organized to begin with! :-)

And here's a look at the whole thing.

I think it came out really nice. And getting this done just gives me the itch to do some more projects! Ahhh I'm so excited to be using my creative muscles again. Oh creativity, how I've missed you!

Happy Fall Ya'll!

While most of the world has been experiencing fall-like weather for a while now (maybe even snow), New Orleans just recently got the memo. I've been seriously counting down the days until the cooler weather would stick...mainly because I want to wear my boots and not sweat in the process. Well lo and behold, this weekend has brought some nice weather down to the big easy!

Loving my new garden flag!

In celebration of fall, I planted some mums in the garden. I'm kind of loving them considering most of my old plants had turned into pretty sticks. I love having some color in the front yard again.

Also, a few weeks ago I hosted a pumpkin glittering party. I never got around the writing about it because I wanted to wait until I could show off the transition from Halloween to Thanksgiving. Here's  sneak peek!

Gardening and the infamous sunflower incident

My garden, much like quite a few things around my house, is not quite normal. Although this is my first real attempt at gardening, I do have an idea of how these plants are supposed to act throughout the Spring and Summer. I'm slowly realizing that gardening involves about 90% guessing. And even that 10% that's supposed to be predictable isn't always what it seems.

I have azaleas, which are supposed to bloom once in the Spring. Apparently they didn't get the memo and bloomed again last week.

I have dying plants that are black at the bottom...and recently decided to flower. It currently looks like the mullet of plants.

And then there's the infamous sunflower incident. I've always loved sunflowers, so I planted some sunflower seeds in the front garden. I was so excited when the seedlings started to sprout. It was such a feeling of accomplishment. I thought it was so interesting to see the whole process of how a seed turns into a sunflower (I even brought a book called The Life Cycle of a Sunflower home from school so Jordan could hopefully become as interested as I was).

He definitely wasn't as amused as I was because my front garden very quickly started looking like a page out of Jack and the Beanstalk. Ok, so MAYBE this wasn't my quirky garden's fault entirely. I probably shouldn't have bought the sunflower package with the word "mammoth" in the title...

So, after the sunflowers had officially overtaken our garden we decided to take action and chop them down. It was kind of a sad day for me, but the package was correct. Even my pretty little flowers turned out to be mammoth. Look how huge they were!

So the moral of this story is: pay attention to seed packages and keep on gardening (aka guessing 90% of the time).

My crazy life lately

My goodness. Life has been absolutely crazy lately! Between teaching and this new puppy, I barely have time for anything. I'm so sleepy, this post will have to be in bullet points.

* Buster is growing fast. Generally he's a very cute puppy. Sometimes he does things like rip my pants, act like a piranha biting my toes from under the table, and dig holes in the yard. As of right now the cuteness outweighs the bad puppy-ness. Let's hope that sticks. haha

Top 2: being a cute little puppy.
Bottom 2: being a piranha

* Last Friday we decided to put our deep fryer to use and fry some eggplant, shrimp, and catfish. By "some" I actually mean a ton. It was a lot of fun though. Always fun to hang out with good friends, make dinner, and have a game night!

Such a fun game! If you haven't played it before, go buy it right now!

* Jordan was the best hubby ever and made me surprise french toast the next morning. I'm not sure he's ever cooked me a fancy breakfast like that before. He definitely gets a good hubby award for that!

SO YUMMY!!! I love breakfast food

* Saturday I was cleaning the house all day in preparation for a bridal shower at my house on Sunday. Somehow cleaning the house morphed into learning how to garden. Great idea at first (as most things like that are). THEN we realized we had no idea what we were doing. It took us literally all day, a lot of digging, a dog tied to our door, and 3 trash cans...but it turned out ok!

The garden before (well, actually before it got absolutely horrible)

So much better! Notice that the circle patch doesn't have a ton of grass in it anymore.
Digging that up was the horrible part!

* Sunday was the bridal shower at my house! Besides the inability to produce trash (because all of our cans were filled with grass and weeds and such), it went very well. Lots of good food and a champagne punch that went over very well. Congrats Rachele! Can't wait for your wedding!

Decorations and the bridal party! I forgot to take a picture of the food - oops!

* Speaking of weddings, I have some exciting news! I will be in 4 weddings this year. One this May, one next March, one next April, and one next June. My goodness, I'm excited!! I've never been in a wedding (except for my own), so I can't wait to have the bridesmaid experience times 4! Next March-June will be crazy, but oh-so-much fun!

* Apparently I'm chocolate dipping challenged. My niece's 1st birthday party is this weekend and I'm making cake balls. Tonight was the trail run, and I have to say - trying to dip them in chocolate = MAJOR FAIL. Hopefully the couple of tips I got tonight will make tomorrow's trail run (part 2) go ok. At least I have a few days to master this!