And now for the latest installment of Annie Lives Simply In Real Life, a client project of the pantry variety.

There wasn’t much decluttering to be done– a few extraneous things had wandered in over time, others had exceeded their intended life span–but for the most part it was a matter of organizing, of straightening and neatening.

Here’s where we started:

Just a bit overgrown, you know?

My mission was clear: pull everything off the shelves, give them a good wipe down, and then put everything back, albeit in a more orderly fashion.

I wanted it to look nice naturally, and I equally wanted to be conscious of maximizing the space, stacking things where necessary in order to prevent any one item or group of items from being greedy shelf-wise. My client also wanted to ensure that those things that were less than beautiful (read: plastic jugs for children’s lemonades stands, etc) were moved to less obvious locations than they had been previously residing. Accentuate the positive and all.

Take a gander at the overall B & A’s below.

There were vases in there, and were there ever vases (we talked about this predicament here if you’ll recall). After sorting through the collection, my client decided she could only part with a couple of them (which I more than granted her, as she happens to normally be a rockstar in the ruthlessly decluttering category). She entertains frequently, likes fresh flowers, yadah yadah, the vases were staying. So how to fit them all?

Ultimately, I solved the spatial accommodation dilemma by placing most all of the clear glass vases together on one shelf, while the colored vases I stored on the tippy-toppest shelf. That way, not only could we fit them all, but we gained a little bit of decor action as well.

And, you know, I did my thing with the food stuff as well.

The pantry had hanging sections like some builder expected a homeowner to hang up their rain coat in the butler’s pantry, which was not only perplexing but also sort of vexing: it meant that we lost all that space being that we had nothing to hang.

It annoyed me to no end until it dawned on me that we did have qualifying hanging things– tablecloths! So the hangers came out and the tablecloths went up and wah-bam, wasted space eradicated.

Here’s the side of the pantry (are we tired of this post yet?):

There’s one pantry down in the worldwide Live Simply mission.