My Organized Pantry!

I am so excited to show you the inside of my pantry today! I shared last week how I had repainted it white to match the newly painted upstairs and now I am sharing how I organized it!

I really liked the way my pantry looked before. The problem was that the colors (sage green and cream) didn’t match the new colors of the kitchen. Also, I had taken the canisters from the pantry and put them on my open shelves in the kitchen so I needed to rearrange things too.

I am loving how it turned out! I found a photo on H&M’s site that served as the inspiration. I even created my own knock off versions of their wooden boxes. I used scrap wood and it didn’t cost me a thing! I stenciled the words on just like I did for the cheese crate that is in the kitchen and dining area. I am going to add black felt to the bottom of the wood boxes since they get slid out so often.

I kept a lot of the same ideas this time around because they worked, so why change them? I love having a place to write down the grocery list. I simply take a photo of it with my phone before I run to the store. This way anyone can add to it as they see something we are out of where as if I typed it just on my phone, I would only have the items I noticed were low.

I am getting terribly low on the home canned items. Normally, I can 20+ things from my garden and have two shelves worth. The bulk of it is in the basement while one row of each goes in this pantry. As the row started to get low, we grab more from the basement and bring them up.

When we run low on a certain food, we buy it from the store and keep them behind the pretty bottles.

The pasta containers not only act as needed storage but also hide the other food items that are not in pretty containers.

The boxes do the same thing as the baskets did in the last version on the pantry. They hold crackers and other snacks for lunches to take to school and after school treats. They do a great job of hiding all the other non-cute cardboard boxes of cereal, pancake mix, etc. too! While the box has apples in this picture, I have since decided to leave the apples in the bowl in the kitchen and put the peanut butter and honey in the little box.

I have four huge drawers below all of the shelves and while the top part has always been pretty organized, sadly I never have done anything with the drawers to make them tidy until now.

I added the baskets that used to have the crackers and snacks to the top two drawers. The top drawer holds utensils used in cooking as well as baggies, plastic wrap, and tin foil.

The second drawer has a basket with all the baking utensils, the baking ingredients that don’t go in the canisters on the kitchen open shelves like (coconut and chocolate chips), and the cookie cutters.

In the past the third drawer was for extra towels for our upstairs bathroom which is just across from the pantry. But I think I am going to use it for miscellaneous kitchen items. It is empty right now.

The bottom drawer is for Shane and I to put our shoes. The kids have crates in the office for theirs but since there was only enough room for 4 crates, we make this drawer work for us!