My Pantry = Grey Gardens II

Have any of you seen the movie Grey Gardens? If you haven't--you need to! I saw it for the first time recently and it's become one of my all-time favorite movies.

It's documentary made in the 70s (a "cult classic"--I don't know what rock I was living under that I never heard about it) about the aunt and cousin (mother/daughter team) of Jackie Kennedy who lived a prestigious and wealthy lifestyle until the husband/father walked out on them and left them with only their mansion in East Hampton known as Grey Gardens.
The mother and daughter ("Big Edie and "Little Edie") live in the once-beautiful mansion with virtually no money and in complete squalor. The house gets so bad that the health department threatens to kick them out if all the violations aren't corrected.

Jackie Kennedy steps in with the money to clean the house and it is said that 1000 bags of garbage were removed! But after the big clean-up, the house quickly falls back into it's squalid state which is where the documentary begins.

It's very fascinating to see these two in action--they sing and dance and reminisce about the wealthy men Little Edie was engaged to and look at old photographs--all the while living amongst many cats, raccoons and complete filth.

Which brings me to my kitchen pantry. I started referring to it as Grey Gardens II because of the squalid condition it had fallen into. See that pic up there of the lady in the moth-eaten fur coat standing in front of the decaying mansion?--Just picture me standing in front of my pantry and there you have the sequel!

The pantry is WAY too large with WAY too deep shelves--so I had a hard time keeping track of what I had in stock. As a result, it became filled with WAY too much soup and more chocolate chips than I could ever use!
I finally decided that I couldn't tackle it without help, so I hired a lady (I call her my "roving commission"--does anyone remember this from The Remains of the Day?? One of my favorite movies...) to help me. We took everything out, cleaned the whole pantry and threw away all kinds of scary things. I embarrassed to admit this, but I threw away seven large garbage bags full of crap. Turns out, I had ten containers of cocoa powder...

I didn't take a true "before" pic but here are a couple of "in progress" pics:

My roving commission organized everything into orderly sections--so now I have no trouble finding things and I know exactly what I have. It's a great feeling!!

For the first couple of days after it was cleaned, I would jut stand there and stare at it.

This next pic is called "It' So Fun To Be Organized!"
Also--there's a scrapbook giveaway at Jenny and the Princess Peonies. Check it out!!