I have been working on organizing my kitchen pantry for several weeks. Then I saw The Home Edit’s show on Netflix and my mind was blown and I was ready to double down on getting it clean. I Marie Kondo’d our house last January and was so excited to take the next step on my path to orderliness. I love organization, and even have rubbed off on my son, who is excited to organize his Legos in color coordinated bins (we got these). I don’t expect them to keep it up and take that responsibility on myself for our household, but it makes me so happy when I see little efforts they make!
My kitchen pantry has a little storage room behind it, under our stairs. When our son was little we used to go in there with the lights off and search for glow in the dark dinosaurs I stuck around the room. We still call it the dinosaur room, but now it’s great for our backstock/overflow items, paper products and extra miscellaneous storage.
BEFORE
This is the pantry before I began organizing (you can see I’d made a small attempt based on the top row, sorting my flour and sugar into bins):
And the other side:
AFTER
Here is my new organized pantry:
And the other side:
To begin, I ordered a few products from the Container Store. It’s a System and I needed to Contain, as THE would say. I found these THE bins, which are great for the granola bars and other easy to grab kid snacks I keep on the lower shelves. I needed more, and they’ve been on backorder online, so I started looking around at other options.
I found many of my storage bins and containers on Amazon, so that I didn’t have to wait long for delivery and could have things shipped to my house (yay for not driving!). I got this and this group of clear containers for things like flour, sugar, baking products, chocolate chips, pasta, fish crackers and other things that were taking up space with cardboard boxes. For cereals, I got these containers, and also have a spare one for the Cheez-Its we love.
For the cans, these awesome can holders work well for overflow cans we keep on the floor. They were just stored in their original packaging but this is much neater. I also got this set of eight of these clear bins, which I use for things on the bottom level and napkins, and ended up using half for our bathroom backstock like Qtips and shampoo.
The final thing was to organize our graham crackers and Ritz. Those fit nicely into these clear bins, which came as a set and fit nicely together.
For things with expiration dates, I copied those onto a piece of paper that I included inside the bin. There were also a few items that I cut the ingredients list and included on the back of the bin. The labels for these sets included stickers in different sizes and shapes and a white chalk marker, which is erasable with a wet paper towel. The bins are also safe for the dishwasher, so changing for different uses will be simple.
SIDE BY SIDE
Here’s the Comparison – ahh, order:
I’m pretty pleased with the order this pantry has now. It makes it so easy to quickly grab things and see where everything is without the cardboard packaging. We could step it up a level with more bins and baskets, but for now this is great for us. What’s your favorite pantry organization solution or hack?
