It's The Little Things...

Today I intended to have a non-productive day. I slept in a bit (yay!!!), then Tyler and I went to visit my friend Mandi to give her a birthday card, then we had a lovely lunch at The Cheesecake Factory, then headed towards home again.  On the way, we were talking about going shopping at Big Lots because they have a 20% off "friends and family" sale today only - figured it was worth the stop to see if there was anything that we just couldn't live without!

We stopped at the Brice/Livingston store and I wandered back to the housewares department.  I was looking specifically for some can risers (aka pantry shelves) so I could get a little more organized... I had been neglecting the kitchen pantry for a while now, and it showed.  I didn't really think that I want to work on it today because my back and shoulders were sore from helping my sister with a project (toilet & flange replacement) at her house last night,  but I figured that I wouldn't find the riser/step things that I wanted so it wouldn't really matter if I could get to the pantry today or not.

Anyway, I go wandering through the housewares and pick up a few storage bins so I can "group" pantry items and make a little more sense of the madness.  I turned around to the closet-storage systems, and lo and behold, I find four of those can-riser things, and they're even the good metal ones!!   My elation was short-lived, though... there was no tag on them, and no corresponding shelf tag.  Bah.  But I went ahead and picked them up, hoping that maybe they can look them up somehow in their register system, or (even better), just make me a deal on them since they weren't labeled!

I grabbed a few more things I needed, then headed to the checkout.  There's two ladies working at the register, and neither of them seem to think that they can look up items without a bar code or tag.  They tried searching the system for "can shelves" or "pantry organizer" but there's nothing.  So one of the ladies says, "well, we can't sell them without accounting for them, so I'll just have to set them aside".  I was so disappointed because I wanted to buy these things...  and then, like a mirage in the desert, the store manager walks up to see if either of the cashiers needed help. (Note that this is why I choose the line that's attached to to "service desk" area - more likely to be visited by managers!!)  The cashier asked him if there was a way to sell a product with no tag and no information, and he just says, "give them all to her for three dollars so we can get rid of them - I don't want to have to find them in the system later!"

I was on cloud nine!!!  Four metal shelves for three dollars??   One of them was slightly damaged though... but still!!  Three metal shelves for three dollars!!   I agreed to the price and headed out of the store, happily toting my prizes to the car.  (the shelves are very similar to these, by the way...)

I got home with all of my handy-dandy organizational tools and promptly repaired the fourth shelf  -  one of the "slats" had lost a weld, so I repaired it with good ol' electrical tape!



Then I went to work, organizing this:

                                      (yes, I know it's a trash-heap...)

into THIS:

The end result of today's organizational journey?


I won't need to buy pickle relish or coffee until sometime in 2013.




Happy Renovating (and organizing!)