Pantry organization

I have seen beautiful pantries on Pinterest and on some bloggers posts, beautiful shelves, beautiful containers and labels. You won’t see anything extraordinary in my pantry but I thought it would be nice to share my pantry with all of you so that you could see that you do not have to spend a lot of money to have an organized and happy pantry.

Over the past year or so I have purchased a few Room Essentials containers from Target and I ordered a few more in the past couple of weeks since I had not seen the color in stores and was worrried I wouldn’t be able to find them in the future. The color is mint.

How to organize

We have 4 shelves and I have them organized by types of food.

• top shelf: recipe books, coffee pods (in green box), misc items
• 2nd shelf: bread items, nuts and chips, pantry food items (extras, pasta and sauces)
• 3rd shelf:  cereals, breakfast items. baking supplies
• 4th shelf: snacks, crackers, potatoes, bento boxes and misc
• floor: extra snacks, water bottles, lunch boxes, bread machine

Labels?

Some people like to label their containers and use clear containers for a lot of the dry items. While it is very pretty and I really like how it looks, I don’t think it is very practical with how fast we go through certain things. I also was trying to spend little money while having a unified look. If I wanted to be really cheap, I probably could have bought some containers at the dollar store but I really like how strong these are and I figure they are a long term investment.

My mother in law lives with us so two of the shelves on this side are hers. The middle shelf holds my spices and condiments. It doesn’t look as nice as the other side but it works and I think that is the takeaway from this post. While a Pinterest or an Instagram worthy pantry is nice, what matters is that you have space for your food! Keeping it organized in a manner that makes sense for you is what manners. If your pantry frustrates you when you walk in or open the door, then do something about it. Think about how you would like it to look and make it happen according to your budget.

A few tips

• get rid of excess cardboard boxes when possible
• throw out or donate items you do not use. Get rid of expired food
• organize things by type: lunch things together, breakfast items together, spices..
• buy similar containers to give a unified look
• DON’T play the comparison game!

I plan to help my friend organize her pantry in a couple weeks. I hope I can take some before and after pictures. She already has some containers she bought from the Dollar Tree and I will use what she has to make her pantry work for her. It is not a walk in but a cupboard pantry. Looking forward to playing with it!

A bientôt!

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