Tag Archives: kitchen

May15

How to Organize Your Pantry Part Two – Dealing with Bread

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How to Organize Your Pantry Part Two – Dealing with Bread

Tension rod bread shelf


So far I’ve dealt with the snacks and spices and now it’s time to deal with the bread items.

Breads and buns and bagels, oh my! All of these items take up a lot of space in a pantry. If you’re not careful they can also be squished by other pantry items. As if the space issue AND the squishing aren’t enough, these items can also get moldy quickly. What’s a gal with a small pantry to do? Tension rods of course!

Scary "before" picture


Remember how we took care of the spices? We’re going to do the same thing with the bread – only this time we are going to use TWO tension rods.

Just like with the spices, I used the flat tension rods. The flat ones snap into place (so they won’t fall down) and things don’t fall off of it very easily.

Flat tension rods

Put your first tension rod under a shelf, just an inch or two from the pantry wall. Once it’s in place, put your second tension rod a few inches in front of that. Now you have a nice little shelf to put your bread on. Not only will they be out of the way, but the space between the tension rods allow for air flow so your bread won’t go moldy as fast!

Underneath picture

May15

How to Organize Your Pantry Part One – Dealing with Spices

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How to Organize Your Pantry Part One – Dealing with Spices

I have a very small pantry. No matter how much I try to keep it organized it always looks messy. There just isn’t enough room on shelves for everything I want to keep in there. I recently came up with the idea of making a snack bar to keep chips, snacks, and bottled water. To see my snack bar click here. With those big items out of the way it was time to focus on the spices. I don’t have a lot of room on the counter to keep spice racks. I also don’t have room in cabinets or drawers. I took some time to look in my pantry and found that there is a lot of wasted space under each shelf. I decided to put my spices there.

Spices Before

I bought a tension rod (I love those things!) at Target to fit the size of my pantry. Typically tension rods are round but I found one that was flat! These are my favorite. They have a latch that keeps them in place (no more falling down) and the flat surface means things wont fall off of it as easily.

Spices After - all nice and neat on tension rod


I put the tension rod in my pantry below a shelf and simply sat all of my spices on top of it. My new “spice rack” cost me $4. How awesome is that!

Apr24

Cleaning Grout on Floors

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Cleaning Grout on Floors


I love cleaning the grout on my kitchen floors. I know that probably sounds crazy but it’s true. It’s such a quiet job and it requires no thought what so ever. I just wish I would’ve started cleaning it sooner.

When I first moved into this house a year ago I thought the grout was supposed to be that dark (this is my first house with a tile floor and I just didn’t know any better). Imagine my surprise, then, when I spilled a little bit of paint on the grout two weeks ago and cleaned it up with a toothbrush and some baking soda and the dark grout turned white! Gross! All this time I was mopping my floors and thinking they were clean when there was probably years of dirt build-up in the grout.

I have a fairly large kitchen and eating area and it has taken me a while to clean them but I’m almost finished. I had thought about cleaning the grout with a steam cleaner, but after asking others who have tried using one to clean their grout, I decided not to (others complained that it didn’t do a deep down cleaning like they wanted and they ended up doing it by hand). So I decided to use a little bit of baking soda (with some spearmint essential oils to liven things up – including my mood), a toothbrush and some elbow grease. It turns out it’s not a lot of hard work, it just takes some time. I almost find it relaxing. I just do a small section at a time especially if I’m stressed out or just need to get away from a project I’m working on. It has the same effect on me as doing a word search, only when I’m finished I can walk in the kitchen and say “Dang! That looks good!”

What you need to clean your grout:
*Baking soda (I pour mine in a glass and mix with a few drops of my favorite essential oils but you can just pour it straight from the box).
*A hard bristled toothbrush
*A cup of water to rinse out the toothbrush
*A wet rag to wipe up your mess

Just sprinkle a little bit of baking soda onto the grout and scrub with the toothbrush. Rinse your brush out every few minutes. Wipe the area clean with a wet rag to remove the dirty water and baking soda. Wipe up the area frequently so the dirty water doesn’t settle back into the grout. For extra tough stains, put vinegar in spray bottle and spray it onto the baking soda that you’ve sprinkled onto the grout. After it bubbles, use the toothbrush to loosen the dirt and grime.

Happy Scrubbing!