Easy Pantry Storage Solution

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I have a confession to make. Ready…ok…

Our pantry is a huge mess and eyesore (see the picture below of our embarrassing mess!) and being the organized person I am it’s hard to admit that. We have our walk-in pantry that has our canned goods, appliances we use occasionally and other bulky items that we don’t use every day. But the pantry right off our kitchen is used all day long. The kids can get snacks, it has our breakfast items and the coffee so everything is readily available when needed.

Some of you may remember back in December I was part of a blog hop where we had a group of bloggers who shared a different themed project for Christmas. Well we are back with another group of awesome bloggers to share with you all different DIY projects each month. This month’s theme is DIY organization and I am excited and a little embarrassed to share our crazy pantry mess before and after!

Here are all the awesome bloggers who are participating:

1905 Farmhouse, Abbots at Home, Bitterroot DIY, By Brittany Goldwyn, Creative Ramblings, Cribbs Style, Delicious & DIY, DIY Beautify, DIY Danielle, Dukes and Duchesses, Girl, Just DIY, Happily Ever After, Etc, Health, Home & Heart, House by the Bay Design, House on Longwood Lane, Just Measuring Up, Kenya Rae, Little Bits of Home, Living Letter Home, My Kitchen My Craft, Pinspired to DIY, Red Cottage Chronicles, Refashionably Late, Renovating Mapleson Manor, Savvy Apron, Shine Your Light, Shrimp Salad Circus, Songbird Blog, Southern Revivals, T.Moore Home, The DIY Dreamer, The DIY Village, The Frugal Homemaker, The Handyman’s Daughter, Two Feet First, What Meegan Makes, Zucchini Sisters

So are problem is that the shelves are open and there are half-open bags of chips, crackers, cookies, flours, and sugars that get thrown into a pile and things get lost, especially on the top shelf that I can’t see. So I decided on my recent stay-cation from work I would tackle this area to make it more efficient, organized, and aesthetically pleasing.

Now I will admit that this process did not happen all at once, I actually started organizing things last Fall and buying baskets and glass containers for storage then as well. I put them to use right away but didn’t tackle everything like I should have. But you know: life!

This entire process of organization took a good part of a couple days  and that is only because I decided to paint the back wall of the pantry since it was never done when we moved in. But  now when I go to find something and it is easily accessible I am glad I took the time. Below is a picture before some of it was painted but after everything had been taken out. (Side note: I am slowly painting all the trim and doors in the house too but I haven’t made it to the pantry yet)

If you are wanting to tackle your own pantry I wanted to share some of my tips.

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 Pantry Organization Tips

First step is to remove everything and by everything I mean EVERYTHING! This is one of the reasons it took me so long to complete this process. Well also because I decided to paint the wall between the shelves and I had to remove everything anyway.

This helps for a couple or reasons, one is that you can clean the shelves of anything that has spilled (honey in my case) and second you can see all the food that you have and discard anything that may be expired or old. That shelf on top had a lot of those unseen open packages for me!

All of our shelves are lined with shelf liner, I actually did this right before we moved in, the shelves are real wood so the shelf liner helped when cleaning up spills.

Organizing Food into Groups

I wanted each basket to be dedicated to certain food items so that it would be easier to locate what we were looking for. So we have baskets dedicated to oils/vinegars, baking supplies, canning supplies, chips/crackers, candy, and snacks for the kids. I used the jars for baking supplies that I don’t use often but want to keep fresh after opening the bag: powdered sugar, chocolate chips, brown sugar, panko bread crumbs. The regular flour and sugar actually sits on our kitchen counter since these are used pretty regularly.

I also decided that our cereal would just stay in their regular boxes since we go through the boxes rather quickly.

Having almost everything organized in baskets and containers now it is so much easier to find what we need and to see what we are running low on. It is so much easier for the kids to reach snacks on the bottom shelf and when it’s time to have a sweet treat they are all nicely organized in a basket on the top shelf. These baskets are my favorite addition to the pantry organization and I just wish I would have done it sooner.

I would love to know what are your favorite pantry storage solutions?

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