Visually Organized Pantry - Order Out of Chaos

With regrets to all you other men out there--I have the best wife ever.  She is beautiful, smart, creative, and somehow she loves me!  She shows it in a myriad of ways every day.  I just want to document one simple example...

The good news is that we have a LOT of food storage.  The bad news is that because we have a lot of food storage we have a plethora of containers which we cram into a couple of pantries and pile on top of each other.  We have used all kinds of labels over the years from tape to different colors of permanent marker--sometimes on the lid, sometimes on the side, and often the lids and buckets would get scrambled making it impossible to tell from the outside what was in them.

All those food staples crammed into a pantry, which we could mercifully hide by shutting the door, made for a fairly dense storage solution in every sense of the word.  For instance, if I wanted to make hot oatmeal for breakfast I first had to unload most of the storage buckets from one or both of our pantries, open multiple lids, and hopefully find the rolled oats (how often have I searched in vain and called plaintively to the rest of the family "anybody seen the rolled oats?" and heard crickets in response).  After using the oats I had to re-stack the whole thing which, of course, would leave them in some new inscrutable order that made it even harder to find what I wanted the next time.

I'm the kind of person that can simply harden himself to pain and inconvenience--I am good at enduring--so I simply lived with this problem for years.  Then, the other day, my very creative, organized, angel-of-a-wife said something like "this is a disaster...it has got to stop!".  She unloaded both pantries, cleaned them out, consolidated all the food-stuffs (sometimes there were two or three partial buckets of the same thing cluttering our lives), and then gave me a list of foods for which she wanted nice color photos printed.  She wanted two of each--once for the lid and and the other for the bucket.

I used Google Image search to find high resolution photos of these various commodities and printed them out in brilliant color.  She took them and attached them to the containers using a "mod-podge" technique.  You can do this cheaply by getting a bottle of the cheapest white glue you can find, pouring it out into a bowl, diluting it with water and using a paintbrush to apply the thin glue, first to the back of the paper you want to attach, and then, after you stick it in place, paint the glue mixture over the front.

Finally she organized the buckets with most frequently used in front or on top, and labeled the shelves with a reference so I'd know what belonged in that spot.

Now life is GOOD.  I open either of these two pantries and am greeted by cheerful colorful visual images of what's in the containers that are so simple they could be understood by a two-year-old--she knows me well!  They are also always in the right spot (we're all on strict orders to put things back where they belong) so I don't have to fish around for things.  I'm actually starting to remember which pantry has what foods stored in it--not bad for an old guy.

I love my wife for so many reasons--too numerous to mention here (though I try to remind her of them as often as possible), but this was one of her labors of love that has blessed me every day since.  It may seem like a simple thing, but  often very simple changes have large and lasting effects.  Those nicely organized, visually- appealing buckets remind me of her kindness every day.  When she sees a problem she just goes about finding a creative and inexpensive solution.  The real function of creativity to make life less better, and she is especially creative when it comes to organizing.  Making order out of chaos is one of God's characteristics--it's one of the many evidences that she is "made in the image of God".  See why I'm such a happy man?
 

In addition she is the hardest worker I've ever known.  I remember when we lived in Michigan that we had a new roof put on our historic farmhouse.  However, to save money we decided we could roof the free-standing garage ourselves.  For safety I tied a rope around my waist, ran it over the roof and tied to to a riding lawnmower in the back yard.  I got a couple of rows of shingles done but it was hot and nasty work.  Linda had me teach her to nail down shingles so she could keep going when I left for work the next day.  By the time I came home from work she had finished shingling.  A few days later I met a new neighbor who had moved in across the street.  In the previous weeks he had observed Linda on a thirty-foot ladder touching up the paint under the eaves of our two-story home, and later up roofing the garage by herself.  He asked me who that amazing woman was working on my house.  I told him it was my wife and he said "What a woman!  Where can I find one of those?".

Thank you again, darling, the pantries are perfect!