"Works for Me Wednesday" - Organizing

Organizing: My Kitchen Pantry

I recently got fed up with my plastic food storage cabinet and my free-standing pantries. We couldn't see what we had, and there was never enough room for what we wanted to put in there. I took two days to take everything out of all three cabinets, lay it out on the kitchen table, re-organize it by category, and then put it back in and labeled the shelves with my Dymo.

The countertop-sized appliances (panini maker, George Foreman grill, Henrietta Hen, etc.) went on the shelves in the cabinet under the microwave, where the plastic food storage had been. The appliances are all large enough to be visible without having to move stuff around, and the cabinet isn't the easiest to look into at a glance — a perfect match.

The plastic food storage got weeded out (hallelujah). Identical stackable pieces got stacked together with all their nesting lids on top. Everything else got its lid put on top of it (to save matching time later) and stacked according to shape/size. Most-used medium-size containers got put on a lower shelf in the pantry, while large ones got stacked on top of the tall pantry (tiny ones got thrown into a basket on top of the pantry).

The categories that needed to be visible (canned goods, sweet snacks, savory snacks, crackers) because we keep forgetting what we have and buying more (or letting them go stale) got put on eye-level shelves. The categories that aren't used often or don't need to be visible because we always know they're there (breakfast, baking, chips, etc.) got put on high or low shelves.

All candy/tiny snacks got sorted into the plastic-storage-I-wanted-to-keep-but-never-used-for-leftovers, so it could be stacked for efficiency and ease of browsing...and so all our candy doesn't end up smelling like mint (which, if you've ever stored all your Christmas candy in one jar or bag before, you know will happen). Even new bags of M&Ms get dumped into their own container. Ahh, order.

Every shelf got labeled so my new order can be maintained by grocery-put-awayers.

It feels great to have all that stuff finally purged and organized, but heck, any day you get to use a label maker is a good day! LOL



This post originally appeared on my family blog and is reprinted with permission.