Organizing My Pantry – DIY

Finding an organizing solution for my pantry was a must. I would find myself cleaning it up more often than anyone should. There were chip bags everywhere, open containers and no one in my family ever knew where anything was. In many cases it would just suck up a lot of time out of my day that I could be using to spend time with my family versus helping them find things. It was so important for me to find an organizing solution with the intent to make the pantry look good and easy to find it all.

I started the project by looking through my pantry and tossing anything that was stale, expired or no one has eaten in a good amount of time. I also moved anything out of the pantry I could put somewhere else to open up space. This step allowed me to then take a really good look at what I had and what containers or baskets I may need to organize it all and make it more efficient.

After we took out the old and what we no longer needed, I then went on to purchase all of the items. This part of the process was interesting for me because I had to think through what would look nice, fit in the space but also make it as easy as possible to grab and go. For example, take a cereal box, you can’t just take a cereal box and put in a “breakfast basket.” Your family would have to pull out the basket, grab the box of cereal, and then open it. If we had a container, poured the cereal in it, your family can then grab the container and pour. That organizing solution alone just saved you 5 seconds which will turn into so much more time at the end when you use the same concept for everything else in the pantry. I also made sure to measure everything. When you have a small pantry this may be difficult to do but you’ll have to get creative and figure out a way to make it work. One solution I found was utilizing a basket with separators so you can use it for more than one item. This came in handy when I came around to creating something easy for the kids. I took a basket with separators and placed more than one different kids’ snacks in it. This organizing solution allowed me to maximize space, the category and it created a different texture by using a different container.

Once the items came in, my next step was to clear out the pantry and organize everything by category, I had a category for breakfast items, kids, breads, dessert, etc. A lot of times when you take a step back and look at what you have, the categories will create themselves. This step was so fun because you could see everything coming together and the different textures that would bring a nice pretty look to the pantry. I think the best part was being able to recycle all of the boxes into pretty containers. It made for such a clean consistent look. After everything was put into baskets or containers I decided to label everything. What’s a pretty organized basket in a pantry if you don’t know what it’s for. For the baskets I used the chalk clips and for the container I used chalk stickers. There were a few in there I picked clear cursive labels for that gave it a little spark.

Putting everything in its place took the least amount of time. I like to say the cleaning up and prep work allowed for this last step to go so much smoother. The idea for this last piece of the project is to make the categories flow nicely and easy access. All of the kids items were put on the bottom shelf to give the kids easy and quick access and an opportunity for them to grab it themselves. As for the flow, I wanted to make sure I didn’t go straight from pasta to dessert even though that’s how a night at our house typically looks like. I wanted an easy transition from one category to the next. Pasta to rice, rice to bread, bread to flour, baking soda to dessert.

I hope this is helpful for your diy home organizing. My best advise to summarize this all is to create something that works for you. You don’t always have to go by the rules. If it has to go in a basket but a book says it shouldn’t, ah! Forget about it! I’m no organizing expert. I have no desire to make organization a career. I’m solely creating organization solutions that work for my family with the purpose to make it easy and save time. I’m a mom with a full time job just trying to get through the day as efficiently as possible. time is of the essence.