I Can't Believe This Took ALL Day!

Hi there! Happy Friday to you!

I decided to tackle my "pantry" today. I thought for sure it would be relatively quick and easy given its small size. Um....nope. I decided to get brave and show you what it looked like before and after. Hopefully you won't think less of me after you see the before shots. LOL

This space is in our big room (the converted two car garage portion of our house). The previous owners created this little space, probably for storage. It's kind of an L shape and it also houses the water heater. The door goes out to our back yard, but we never use it. After we moved in, we added the wire shelving. Oh and Steve added texture to the walls and ceiling. What a joy that was to try to clean (not).

So here's what it looked like as you look into the space.

Turning to your left is more shelving with who knows what stashed here and there. Oh there's Steve's jimson weed plant. He brought it inside, I think to try to preserve the seeds in case it doesn't grow next year. The silver vent tube is Steve's jerry-rigged "pipe" to get the heat to go into the big room and not just warm up the pantry.

Oh my gosh...what all is up there?!!!

And what is down here??

Brace yourself. Here's what what actually IN that space!

Can you believe it? I think I said holy cr*p, I can't believe that all came out of that little space!

At 9:05am this morning I had everything pulled out of the space and the cleaning began. First, I vacuumed off the spider webs. Then I started washing down the walls. That door took some effort. Then I started washing the baseboards and the floor. E-gads, THAT took forever! I think I finally got done about 1:00 and I took a break to eat lunch and take a shower. I started putting the shelves back into place. And adjusting them because I forgot where they originally were. LOL I had to fight some of the braces to get them in place. By then it was time to head out to get the girls from school. And I STILL had to go through all the items before I could put them back. Sigh...

I started that about 3:00. And at 5:00 I had finished vacuuming the big room and took the last garbage bag out to the trash. At 5:05 or so, Steve walked up the driveway from work. I had a bag for Goodwill and oh about 3 large bags full of expired food. Ugh. I definitely won't let THAT happen again.

Here's what it looks like now...

Look, there's open space!! I plan on cleaning out cupboards in the kitchen and putting things I don't use very often up there.

I discovered that the mice we had earlier found the Top Ramen soup packages and ate into a couple of them....ewwwww. But I'm pretty confident that they are all gone now because I didn't see any "evidence" of them yesterday when I was moving couches to finish up the cleaning of the big room. (whew)

I have to say I'm absolutely pooped right now. My whole body is sore, actually. But I'm SO glad to have this done!

Thanks for visiting and hope you enjoyed this little "tour" of my pantry. Just a couple more rooms to go and I'll be done with this major part of my deep clean. Then I'll move on to the stuff behind closed doors (oh my).