Pantry Organization

I don’t do well with clutter or nonfunctional spaces.  Unfortunately I somehow have way too much of those two things at my house now.  I’ve been extra inspired lately by pintrest and some amazing organizational blogs (check them out on my blog roll page) and have been itching to do some organizing (which I'll of course be sharing with you!).  December isn’t exactly the optimal time to be organizing my house because inevitably every organizational adventure includes a stage where the space looks MUCH worse because everything is strewn on the floor, counters, and whatever space is available at the time.  So, I managed to contain my organizational excitement and focused on Christmas.  My organization itch wouldn't go away though so when I was home I decided it would be a great idea to have an organizational adventure at my parent’s house!  It’s always more fun to make a mess at someone else’s house anyhow, right?

My dad has commented before that our pantry looks great or amazing, or some other hugely complimental word like that.  He’s not the kind of guy who usually notices or ever comments on stuff like that so I was surprised.  When I got to my parent's house I realized why though.  The pantry drove me NUTS!  My mom is a great organizer, but the pantry seemed to have her overwhelmed.  Sometimes an extra eye and set of hands is all you need.  The pantry shelves are so deep that my mom didn’t want to waste the space, but this created a new problem of things being shoved to the back and forgotten about.  I figured it would take 1, 2 hours tops to reorganize. Boy was I wrong.

This is what we started with.

  

We began by taking EVERYTHING out (this is how the strewn about every flat space stage occurs) and checking every single expiration date.  Most of the stuff was fine, but there were a few things that were a bit past their prime.  One item expired in 2003.  Another was in 2006.  That stuff went straight to the trash.

There were a lot of little things that didn’t have a home so we decided to get some bins and baskets to wrangle like items.  I happen to think the oxo containers are the best things since sliced pickles.  We picked up a couple more of those for foods that's always on hand like, such as cereal or pretzels.   Not only do the containers simplify the space, but they also keep food fresher longer.  We searched the dollar store but they didn’t have much left in the container section so we headed to Wal-Mart where we picked up the majority of the other containers.

The cat food had been taking up a shelf while the floor space was cluttered with cat food bags and recycling containers that overflowed.  We quickly fixed that with four rolling containers with flip lids.  These hold two different types of cat food (two different cats…picky eaters) and two different types of recycling.  The rollers make them easily accessible and the flip lids don’t allow for recycling overflow.

The cans were a huge issue.   She had two shelf dividers, one in front of the other.  However, this actually made it harder to see the cans.  We split these up and grouped like things together.  The items that she only had one or two things of went into another cupboard onto a pull out drawer for easy access.

We used small, stackable drawers to wrangle the smaller things like tea bag packets and crackers.   The baskets held chips, nuts, popcorn fixins’, and baking chips.  We were able to use a couple baskets she already had on hand for this part.

To top it all off we found some free printable labels online, used our own pretty font, and laminated them. 

We were both very satisfied with the end result (and even my dad was impressed!).  I kept opening the pantry for the rest of the week just to check out our handiwork.  I reorganized our pantry a few weeks ago but unfortunately I was a big disappointed with it when I got home.  It just doesn’t look as amazing as my mother’s pantry does now!

This is just the beginning of the organizational spree so stay tuned for more posts.  The rest hopefully will be in my own home :)