A $5 Pantry Makeover

While focusing so much on our main living spaces, a few other places started falling by the wayside.  One of these spaces was our tiny pantry.  Most of our kitchen appliance are hibernating in our basement storage room since we don’t have space for them in the kitchen or pantry and we don’t use a of them right now.  Once we have a bigger kitchen, we plan on using the heck out of all of them, but for now they are waiting for a special day when we will pull them out.

Our pantry mainly holds our food, miscellanious kitchen supplies (ziploc bags, tin foil, clothes pins for bag clips, etc.), and our commonly used kitchen appliances.

This is what our pantry looked like before:



Yikes, right?  The top shelf in the photo is our roommate’s – he doesn’t cook as much as we do, so his shelf is pretty bare.  Our food self is below that, which overflows into our extra storage shelf below.  There are two other shelves (the very top and bottom) not pictured which were pretty organized since we don’t use them as much.

I pulled everything out of our two main shelves so I could sort them.



We picked up some inexpensive (I think they were about $1.90 each) white bins to corral the items.

Here is the beautifully organized after:



We basically reversed what we had.  Food is still on top, but after organizing and sorting everything, we had room for some of the things on the bottom shelf, which meant we could fit more from other unorganized places in the kitchen in the lower shelf!  I love it when that happens!

Here’s a closer look:



Breakfast/baking on the back left, canned goods in the middle in the back, Other everyday foods in the back right.  Everyday boxed kitchen items on the left in front, my favorite popcorn bowl I use all the time in front, and some random foods/medicines on the right.



Vases/glassware in the back (not viewable in the photo), random things like my lunch bag, grater, straws, and skewers in the front bin, and then oft used things like our casserole dish, large skillet, food processor, and splatter screens.

I love that this only took about ten minutes and was under $10 to do!  I have some crazy fascination with organizing things, so this actually energized me.  I often open the door and stand in awe when I should be praising my man as he cooks (since he is sweet and does 99% of the cooking around here while I tell him how awesome he is).  As much as I love how organized this is, though, I cannot wait to have a kitchen with real space for all of our kitchen appliances and food, since when kids come along in a few years, I know we are going to need all the space we can get for supplies and food.

How do you keep your food and kitchen supplies organized?