If I had a dollar for every time I was standing in the kitchen, cooking with Stefan and he asked, “Hey where’s the flour/sugar/cornstarch/_________(fill in the blank with other random pantry staples)?” while he gazes into the drawer of such goodies in our kitchen, I would be able to take my family to Tahiti this year for Christmas. But alas, no one has been paying me to answer those questions, and the drawer just continues to cause more trouble. So after the successful overall of the other drawer below this one recently, I decided it was time to jump on this one.

As you can see, it’s not totally horrible — but it’s definitely not a quick and easy process to find what you’re looking for on the first go since so many of the containers are the same but have different contents. So I first just started shuffling the contents of the drawer around until I had similar sized drawers all together, and most of the taller ones toward the back with the smaller ones toward the front. I wanted to maximize what fit in the drawer without really adding or subtracting anything from it since the majority of the items in there are general cooking staples like flour, sugar, rice, pasta and the like.

Then as I stood there looking at the drawer, I realized I could make use of my super fantastic label maker and the fact that I have lots of new label tape to your. Yippee! πŸ˜‰

If you’re thinking I kinda sound like I have OCD or I’m a bit too excited about the labels, sort of like Monica when she makes the filing system for Chandler’s job search in Friends, don’t worry — I’m totally not offended. In fact, I’m sure I have more in common with that character than I’d like to admit. But in my world, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being able to find stuff quickly in your drawers instead of having to pick up every container just to find the flour.

The end result — we’re thrilled about being able to find stuff in the drawer now and it’s not only super clean looking, but it truly does speed up the process of cooking and baking. Some part of me wonders why I didn’t do this before, but since we always had our stuff on a pull out shelf in the past where you could see the fronts of the containers, it wasn’t all the necessary. And somehow, it just took me a little while to realize this was not only smart but absolutely necessary to make life run smoother in general. Sometimes it’s just the little things that help put your mind at ease!

Up next? Well, at some point, I have to tackle the most horrifying drawer of all: the junk drawer that holds batteries, random junk and more random junk. The drawer was once fairly well put together (at the farm), especially since a little girl I know loved to play in it and take everything out on a regular basis. But when we moved in here, it became even more of a “catch all drawer” than ever before — and now it’s just getting out of control. So at some point after Thanksgiving, that will be on my to do list. But for now, I will savor the wonderfulness of our organized pantry drawer! πŸ˜‰