My Pantry

I love my husband. His main goals in life are to provide for, protect, and enjoy his family. He does these things well. Another goal he has at the top of his list is to make ME happy. I just mentioned how I would like to make room in the closet off the kitchen for a small pantry. He has spent today building me a wonderful full sized pantry!! I am in awe of how he can create something out of nothing. His ability to make things out of wood is wonderful. There are many things in my home that Sweet Hubby has made to make our home more beautiful. I will, one day soon share these things with you.

For now, I will share my grocery shopping trip. I shopped at Super Wal Mart today. Next week I will actually go to Kroger for their sale and Wal Mart for everything else. UGH! That sounds exhausting. I may talk to Sweet Hubby and see if I can do a bi-weekly shop instead of weekly. My feet hurt!! I had 2 FULL carts of groceries...twice as much as usual and I intended to cut my bill in half. Last week I spent a total of $413.66 on food. GASP!! So this week I had a budget of $200.00. I changed a few things about my list. First I changed the kinds of foods I bought. Hardly any prepared foods. No treats or cookies, etc. No frozen bags of fries or chicken nuggets. Another thing I changed is, I looked at the prices. For example, I buy Cottonelle TP (I won't change that) and I noticed I could buy 24 double rolls for 11.94. Well I looked at the 12 double roll package and it was 5.50. It was cheaper to buy 2 of those...I would have never looked. I also saw the cottage cheese I buy was 3.64!! I switched to the store brand for a 1.40 savings. Cereal is a biggie here. Kyle eats a Jethro size (small mixing bowl) bowl of cereal in the morning, at 3 pm and at bedtime he has a normal size bowl. I told him he would be able to have his Jethro bowl in the morning and a regular size bowl at some point during the day....he would need to choose another snack for his third hunger pang. I bought a total of 7 large boxes of name brand cereals today. Another area where I do not care for store brand, and in this case there is not much savings. The price difference in cereal at Wal Mart and Kroger is DOLLARS. Wal Mart is 1/3 cheaper. I hope we do not go through the 7 boxes in one week, but this will tell me how many I need. I also had several things on my list for my baking center...I spent 29.10 in that isle alone. (I added with a calculator each section...dairy, baking, frozen, etc., just to see what I spend). OK, so GRAND TOTAL was $209.42!!! I only bought 2 things that were not on my list and those were for my mom, who gave me cash, so I guess I was only over my budget by $6!! I DID cut my bill in half and we will be eating better than we ever have!! If I can do this then anyone can!! Little TJ came over wearing his new shirt. I had not seen him in several days. Rachel said he was calling me on his toy phone. When they came over this afternoon, he said all the way here "I like the Grandma". Awwww. What happens at Grandma's, stays at Grandma's!! Well, all the groceries are put away and the Egg Casserole is in the oven. It was a good day! Here are a few pics of my finished pantry. They are dark, so I apologize.

Just to note...I am using this full size pantry for overflow. I still use my wonderful panrty with the sliding drawers for all of our food we are using. There is just no way I can bulk shop and have extra storage for extra boxes of cereal, etc. with my kitchen pantry alone. Isn't it wonderful?? Thank You Sweet Hubby!!!