Our technical “pantry” in our home really isn’t a pantry, because we store our microwave and cookware in it, but we create pantries for clients all the time. Recently in our household, we’re all about buying for one week at a time, which means we don’t need a lot of pantry storage. No more, no less. It’s totally working for us, but we realize that doesn’t work for all families.
We loooove incorporating pantries for our clients and this project was one of our favorites! They didn’t have a pantry before, and this stay at home momma who is always on the run with 3 active littles needed an oversized pantry for lots of optimal buying in bulk storage.
Where this pantry is now, used to be a sliding glass door out onto the deck and a chair rail overlooking into their living room…
So never say never, that you can’t incorporate a pantry if that’s on your bucket list when undergoing a kitchen remodel!
Once you have the full pantry…organizing it is the tough part.
Today, we wanted to share with you guys the neat freak’s five ways to organize your pantry shelving.
1. Get Rid of Expired Items
This is easy to do when undergoing a remodel, but if you’ve been living in your home for quite some time and are about to tackle the organizing stage…get a couple of big garbage bags because you’re going to need them!
Most of us have way more expired items than we think in our drawers or pantries. Spices, mixes, and chips/crackers eventually expire or get stale and we often don’t realize it. Before organizing your pantry, go through all of your items and throw out food that is expired.
When we organized our kitchen, we found hundreds of expired spices. How these little things made it through 30+ moves and across the US, more than once, is beyond me.
This is what I filled up in our home from just expired spices. This didn’t even include the rest of the cabinetry!
2. Buy Clear Bins to Group Similar Items
Rather than having all different types of food all over your pantry, figure out groupings of similar items. Place these items close to each other and then buy clear bins to store them together. This ensures that similar items are by each other, preventing you from buying more than you need and makes it easy for the kids or you to grab what you need when it’s clearly marked and together.
For example, we have five clear bins for our meals for five days of the week. The other two days we either have leftovers, or we eat out. We never meal plan for more than five meals, or you’ll find a lot of food going to waste.
Then if/when we do buy in bulk, which is when things are on sale, we group items together such as pasta in one bin, quinoa and rice in another, snacks in one, etc.
3. Plan Out Your Meals
Having a plan for what you will make for your family helps to keep your pantry from getting out of control. Only buying what you need and know you’ll use helps to keep the space organized, and where you can quickly find what you need.
As I mentioned, we devote a whole drawer to five bins that represent the weekdays and then place our grocery items for each meal in their respective bin. This helps us stay on track and have a spot to grab from when we’re ready to make dinner. Or if momma hasn’t made it home in time, daddy knows what to pull out and start at least boiling the water.
4. Use Lazy Susans or Slide Outs
Here it is, our pantry! I know, it’s huge…ha! But this is all we decided we needed. We put our microwave on the bottom shelf for optimal storage space so that it wasn’t taking space on the countertop. We had been using the top two shelves for food storage. Once we got our food planning down, we realized we didn’t need this space for storage and swapped it out for our other cooking gadgets and salt, pepper, and oils that we regularly use, which we put on lazy susans, or what I like to call – swivels.
Before…
And after…
So much more organized, and makes it so much happier to open the doors and look inside!
5. Label
And our favorite, Classy Clutter’s pantry! Every time they post this on their Instagram I wish I actually did have a pantry, just for the looks! If you want some more organizing tips, these ladies know how to do it. They put together a full post here on how they designed and organized their pantries.
Besides the bomb wallpaper, they’re so good with their labeling and labeling is key when it comes to organizing!
How happy would you be opening up your pantry to this?
Hope these top five tips help you get your pantry organized and if you’re looking for a full kitchen organizing post you can see what we did with our kitchen here: Organizing our Kitchen Cabinets.
