Likely one of the most bustling places in your home besides the bathroom, the pantry is a central hub for activity! Growing up in our home, it was non-stop action. My mother was always hosting get togethers so there was never a shortage of snacks! However, I never realized how important her organized shelves were until running a home myself. Organizing your pantry is key to the successful function of your overall kitchen experience.
That said, my pantry more often than not winds up with shelves overflowing, grocery bags scattered around, and food that has been hidden in corners for an embarrassing amount of months!
Here are my tips on how to successfully organize your pantry! Starting with the before pic:
Eliminate Waste
Okay, here’s where my embarrassment comes in (insert facepalm emoji). In order to organize anything, you have to eliminate items no longer needed. In your pantry, that’s more than likely to be expired food. It certainly was the case in mine!
Pantries come in all types of styles and sizes, but I find it most helpful to start with the ground and work my way up. In my pantry, the ground was covered with back stock: trash bags, bulk food items, and part of my gift wrapping stock (tip here – don’t try to combine organization areas. I.E. don’t put your gift wrap items in with your food). The first step for me was to pull all of that out and evaluate what actually belongs in my pantry. And that does not include the gift wrap!
Moving up from there, I started combing through all of my shelves, shifting each item to locate expired or hidden items that I’d completely forgotten about. As you find items that are expired, pull them out and set them aside. I used a trash bag to toss my expired items into.
Once you clear out the expired items from each shelf, you may be surprised at how little you actually have to work with now!
Dust the Shelves
Does this tip make me sound like a neat freak? Yes. Am I willing to accept that title? Absolutely!
I don’t know anyone who frequently cleans their pantry shelves – if you do, that’s awesome, but I certainly don’t.
Take this opportunity to dust those shelves that otherwise get no attention in your weekly cleaning line up. I also took this opportunity to sweep the floor of my pantry underneath my lowest shelf. There are some very interesting items that find their way back there, including some major dust bunnies!
Organize for Use
This is where everyone’s individual family needs and practices come into play. You won’t realize how much time you waste digging through the pantry until you structure it so that it works for you instead of against you.
Start with the items you use at least once a month: For our family that includes baby formula stock, select vitamins, aprons, cough drops, & more. Stock these items on the shelf right above ground level – this allows access when needed, but not necessarily in the prime location.
Next find the items you use everyday: For us this includes chip bags for lunches, breakfast bars, snack foods, and more. These Items are organized on the shelf that is hip height for optimum efficiency. You can literally open the pantry, grab & go.
Going up! – The next shelf holds the cooking items I use at least weekly, if not daily. Those items include salad ingredients, pasta, rice, chicken broth, etc.
After that, the next two shelves hold items I use less frequently: baking ingredients and additional kitchen appliances. I have to use a step stool to access these shelves (or ask my husband for use of his long arms) so I don’t want items that I have to use frequently stocked on them. Otherwise, my day is spent grabbing the step stool and putting it away over and over again.
This is the most efficient structure I have found for our family, however, make yours unique to the needs of your home. You may bake more than I do and therefore would want these items on a lower shelf. Or if you have a smaller kitchen, those additional appliances may be used more often and so could be stored on the floor.
Whatever you family’s needs, putting thought into the structure improves overall efficiency.
Organization Solutions
Okay, you’ve eliminated the waste, discovered the optimum structure for your remaining items, what’s next?
Now you want to think through how to organize the shelves in a way that looks neat, uniform, and aids in helping you locate the items when needed. I would hate to really know the amount of hours I have spent digging through grocery bags, half eaten chip bags, and jars of soup looking for a box of Mac & cheese.
Try to group similar shapes and sizes together – this is one of the most basic rules of organization. For example, in my pantry you can see that the boxed items are grouped together, cans, bags, etc. Once you have the similar shapes gathered, it’s kind of like a fun jigsaw puzzle. If you have taller shelves like mine, use that to your advantage by stacking things like soup cans on top of one another, labels facing out. If you have shelves that are deeper, try to “stack out”- like our formula in this picture – start with one and line the others up in front of that to maximize the space you have.
Try to keep everything as tight up against the next item as possible to avoid wasting any space. You’re likely to find, once you have similar items grouped and organized, that you have some left over items that don’t necessarily fit with others. In this case, if you have some holes in your shelves, that’s where these can go. For example, I only had two of the orange Vitamin Water bottles. After I organized all of my other items on this shelf, I had a narrow strip of space that was perfect for these, and they wound up right beside the sparkling water which fit well.
Find Fun Bins
So, I’m a little bit of a neat freak and finding cute storage containers is kind of my favorite thing. While I would like to find even more, I have a couple of them in my pantry currently that really help organize the space. However, these items can be extremely expensive. My husband once purchased me a simple for pack plastic set from the Container Store, and it was almost $60.00! Not wanting to spend a small fortune on storage containers, my mom came over one day and showed me how to use simple decorations around the house to accomplish the same purpose.
The goal with organizing is to make it efficient, clean, and accessible. One of the best ways to do this is to eliminate unnecessary messes. For us, that meant the extra large box that the small chip bags come in for our lunches. My mom poured these out and organized them on this wooden tray that had been just sitting around not being used for much. Not only did it cut down on a box, it also organized the chip stock so now I never have to wonder when it’s time to purchase more.
Something similar can be done with extra grocery bags. I know we can’t be the only family that winds up with dozens & dozens of grocery bags scattered around the floor. To fix this, I ended up stuffing the bags into one of our large coolers. The nice thing about most grocery bags is that you can stuff them into each other & press the air out. This condenses them down, making the storage space much more manageable.
These are simple, cost effective measures to accomplish the goal of organization.
Final Organizing Thoughts
I hope the tips shared above aid you in organizing your pantry space. Since having my baby, several of the spaces around the home have fallen into clutter disrepair. Getting this one back in business helps me tremendously as I begin cooking again and learning a new routine with little man!