Pantry Makeover

Cami's pantry was WAY overdue for an organizational makeover. She was frustrated with the lack of order and wanted better use of her space. Extra deep shelves made it easy for things to get pushed back and lost.

The floor of the pantry had become a catch-all for everything and anything. Cami really wanted to put her large containers of flour and sugar there, but there was no room! Without a place for things to go, food was often tossed on shelves in the original grocery bags, making it impossible to find and use them later.

In an effort to create some order, Cami had bought plastic "can organizers" which were supposed to allow the cans to stack and roll easily. Unfortunately, that only happened for cans of the correct size (soup cans) and bigger things (enchilada sauce) just got stuck in the wrong place and messed everything up. In addition, these "organizers" were shallow and so other things got put in front of them and they were essentially unusable.

We began by emptying the entire pantry and lining up food according to their type -- all the crackers together, all the baking mixes and goods together, etc. Cami was surprised to find out how much food she really had! Six boxes of graham crackers, 4 cans of cocoa mix in addition to boxes and boxes of cocoa packets, dozens of packages of pudding and snack crackers, etc. What Cami realized is that her disorganization was costing her a lot of money spent to buy things she already had. Sadly, some food was so old that it had to be thrown away. More money lost. The good news was that she wouldn't have to buy cake mixes for a long time!
We began by creating a Snack Box for Cami's children. Now Cami can control what things they have by what she put in their box and the kids love it because they can access it themselves. Cami even made one for her husband with the granola bars he likes and things he adds to his lunches each day.

While it's fun to use brand new plastic containers for organizing, notice that with Cami's pantry, we used lots of free paper boxes and empty plastic containers from food. Use what you have. We combined as many duplicates of food as we could, eliminating half full boxes of crackers. And, instead of several boxes of fruit snacks and drink packets (see upper right shelf), we put them all into one larger container and threw away lots of unnecessary boxes, condensing space.

We stacked older food to the front and the newer products of the same kind toward the back. We used containers for most things so packets and small bags didn't get lost behind. Notice on the bottom left, we stacked her taller canisters in back, shorter in front and labeled them clearly and brightly so she could easily find what she needed.


Does it look great?! Cami said that every time she looks in the pantry she is surprised! It's just fun to open the door and look at the beauty of an organized pantry.