The Dreaded Pantry Cupboard

Linking up with Jules at Pancakes and French Fries as part of the William Morris Project.  Check out her blog for lots of great links!

This house has one of those "pantry cupboards" in the kitchen.  The cupboard is as big as a refrigerator, and has four roll-out type shelves.  I know that people love these cupboards, but I really don't.  All the hardware necessary to make the shelves roll takes up a lot of room, not to mention that the shelf is actually a shallow drawer, meaning that there is even less space for pantry items.  And it is really hard to organize!

Case in point:

Things are just thrown in, with no real rhyme or reason.  Except for the all the plasticware being on the bottom shelf.  A closer look?  Sure.  Here we go, from top to bottom.

Ugh.  What a dump!  But after a little bit of time, some rearranging of foodstuffs, and some vacuuming (I shake my fist at you, onions and potatoes!), I now know what is in here.

The plasticware has all been sorted and nested.  We are moving slowly to glass storage containers, which are kept in a different cupboard (where they won't roll around when I pull out the "shelf"), but I'm not willing to just throw away all the plastic.

This shelf probably had the most dramatic turn around.  I put most of the dried beans into wide mouth quart mason jars and found a couple of baskets for potatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger.  Hopefully the baskets mean that I won't have to drag my vacuum to the cupboard again.  I like the mason jar idea, but eventually I would like something a bit bigger.  A one pound bag of beans does not quite fit into a quart jar.  I've labelled them with masking tape since I think I will want something else eventually, but these were here and they function so much better than the pile of bags that I had going on before.

Mainly jars on one side, mainly bags of stuff on the other.  I suppose this would be the condiment/breakfast/dried fruit shelf.

And then the tea.  More than half this shelf is tea.  The mason jars on the left are the large tea bags I use for iced tea.  (I had a lot of mason jars around.)  After seeing this, I think I should probably hold off on buying tea for awhile.  Especially since there is also this in the kitchen:

Yup. More tea.  The pretty containers make it out of the cupboard.  Fourteen (!) more tea varieties.  Geez, I hope tea doesn't go bad.  Habit or vice?  At this point, I'm not sure.

Anyone else have any "healthy vices"?