I have a narrow pantry, and especially at this time of the year, it gets filled quickly with flour, sugar, cocoa, soups, oils, nuts, chocolate chips, etc. I also like to bake bread, so I have several different kinds of flours for that. Needless to say, things have been piling up, and it has been difficult to see what is in the back of the pantry without moving everything in the front out of the way!
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| Before |
I decided it was time to do a little reorganization. I did a bit of research online and found various items for stacking and storing items. First, I bought a 3-tiered organizer to stack oils, vinegars and honey bottles. I rearranged spices and baking items on a turntable. I bought a spice rack to attach to the door, but it wouldn't attach properly with the grooves in the door, so back to the store it went.
Then I came across these great Pop Containers by OXO. They come in various sizes with descriptions of what products best fit them (like a 1-lb bag of coffee beans fits nicely in the 1.5 quart size container). They are see-thru, stackable, easy to clean, and they provide a good seal to protect your food. I bought containers for cereal, bread flours, brown sugar, popcorn and coffee. Buying a few at a time allowed me to get a better estimate as to which other size containers I would need and how I could better organize items.
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| OXO Pop Container - 1.5 quarts |
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| Just push the top button down to seal. |
Below is my first stab at reorganizing. I already had a few plastic and glass jars or tins which I used in addition to the OXO containers, as they are a bit expensive. If you have shelves that are taller than mine, the stackable feature becomes even more useful for saving space in your pantry or cabinet. I also had a stacking shelf for soups and other items that I kept. It was previously blocked by all the items in front of it, which could spell trouble for those of us who buy what we don't realize we already have, because it's 'out of sight, out of mind!'
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| Halfway there |
After evaluating what I did so far, I determined that the round flour and sugar canisters I had weren't going to work. By replacing them with the OXO rectangular containers, they fit more snugly together, saving more room for the other items on the shelf. I decided that the single turntables weren't doing enough to take advantage of the vertical space, so I bought a double turntable for the top shelf to hold my spices and other baking items like cocoa and baking powder, and I 'Goodwilled' the single ones.
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| After |
Well, what do you think? It's kind of eccentric with the different organization styles, but it's much less chaotic! I can find things easier now, and the loose items like flours, sugars, cereal and pasta stack nicely side-by-side.
Shopping notes: You can buy the containers (and other pantry organizers like the ones in the picture) at Container Store, Bed Bath and Beyond, Williams Sonoma and World Market. They run about $10 for the 1.5 quart size container up to $19 for the 5.5 quart (the size I bought for cereal). You can label the containers if you need to for easy identification. I just bought a couple of sheets of kitchen labels from Container Store.
