How I organised my pantry, and you can too!
Would you like a beautifully organised pantry? Here are some tips on how to achieve that.
After I’d made the labeled jar for my laundry powder, I kinda had the bug.
I loved how the laundry powder jar looked, so I thought I could also have loads of fun making pretty labels for all my pantry jars and containers.
Months before all this I had bought a machine, on sale, that turns paper cutouts into stickers – perfect for pantry jar labels, right? I hadn’t used it at all since I’d bought it, but now I had the perfect reason to haul it out.
This turned into a major job because when I went into the pantry to make a list of what stickers I would need to make, I found that there were lots of food items, and baking items and snacks that where just plonked on the shelves in their original packaging, and could really do with their own containers. Which in turn meant more labels to make!
This got me thinking that the pantry really could do with a thorough re-organisation. After all, if I’m going to spend time making pretty labels, I wanna be able to see them. This is how the pantry looked when I first moved into this house to live with my husband-to-be around six years ago:
Pantry Before
This was before I moved all my kitchen food and baking items in there. It was a lot more crowded after that.
I didn’t take a photo of what it looked like just before I did this latest sort out because I wasn’t planning this blog at the time. So you’ll just have to take my word for it. It wasn’t really bad, but there was a lot of room for improvement.
How I organised my pantry
The first task was to take stock.
What things had crept into the pantry that didn’t really belong there? Out they went!
What items of food were passed their “use-by date”? Out they went!
What items had drifted to the back and had died a second death? Out they went too!
After the purge and assessment of what was left I went straight to Pinterest to do some research, (research = perving at pictures of beautifully organised pantries to get ideas). I have mentioned how much I love Pinterest, right?
Then it was off to the shops to stock up on baskets, trays and bins. (stock up = a shopping spree, Yipee!)
I’m not really a great lover of housework, but I really enjoyed this project, and I absolutely love the outcome. Although hubby is still grumbling about not being able to find the odd thing. This is how it looked when I’d finished.
So how did I get to this?
I picked up these hanging containers from Briscoes and hubby made me some ‘S’ hooks so that I could hang them under the spice racks. This idea I picked up from Pinterest. It’s great because for a few dollars you are able to use space that was completely unused before. And these containers hold the kind of things that just make a messy pile on a shelf. Much tidier!
Next I tidied up and cleaned all the spice racks. Once sorted out there was spare room so extra unruly packets of soup and gravy mixes went in there.
One of the most wonderful thing of this clean out was that I finally had room on a pantry shelf to unpack my recipe books. They had been tucked away in a cardboard box since my big move.
We had a lot of bottles of sauces and flavourings, vinegars and cooking oils. They took up a lot of space and it was always hard to get to the ones at the back without knocking others over. Now housed in two baskets, they take up a fraction of the space and to get to one at the back I can just slide the basket out and get the one I want. Easy peasy!
Here are a couple of the new labels I made. The big ones like this had to be Mod Podged on as they were too big for my sticker machine.
And here are some smaller ones. You can also see the really old, (possibly antique given where I found it), jar that I now use to keep my muffin cups in.
A basket with a chalk board label for our fresh bread.
I added a small, but long standing shelf in the back, making use of space in the height that was unusable before. The jars of baking ingredients fit well underneath, and on top are all my small jars of different herbal teas.
On the bottom shelf I put large bins which I bought from The Plastic Box. These are really great for holding more difficult to contain things like bags of potato chips. I have two for snacks, one for crackers and one for pet items such as their worming medication and bags of treats.
Another tray for all our soda stream flavours.
Hubby and I both love home made fresh bread, but the bread maker takes up too much room on the bench to leave it out all the time. Since there is a power point in the pantry, and since I now had more room after the big clean out, I was able to put a small table in there with the bread maker on it. Now we can just set it to run in the pantry where it’s very close to all the ingredients needed for the bread, and it’s out of the way. Perfect!
On the bottom tray of the table is a basket with our medicines in it, a couple of large containers we use for watering our many plants, a container of paper napkins and another one which holds the cleaning cloths I use solely for the espresso machine.
It’s a bit hard to see up on the top shelves, but the very top shelf is full of empty jars and bottles which we save for when we do preserving. The second shelf down is full of all the home made sauces, chutneys and preserved fruit we’ve made over the summer.
The pantry is pretty full right now. We often take advantage of specials to stock up on the things we use most often. We have just done a really big shop when these photos were taken so it’s looking a little more crowded than usual.
The great thing I find with getting really organised, is that when there is a specific place for everything, it’s so easy to always put it back in it’s place. So things stay tidy. Which means less tidying up to do on a daily basis. I’m actually really loving it. Wait till I show you my wardrobe!
Check out our shop – I’m going to put my pantry label pack in there for FREE!
Do you have any tips on organising a pantry? Or any great storage ideas for pantries? We’d love to hear them. Please share your ideas in the comments.
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