This might seem like a basic task at the start, but I was 2 1/2 hours fussing over these cupboard which were already partly done before I had started.
I had done a couple of shelves the week before, but decided that I didn't like where some of these jars of cooking sauces and condiments were because they were right in the middle of everything. This is not what I wanted, I wanted the main shelf there to be for snacks and food for the family.
After much pushing and arranging things and letting go of some products that were hiding on the bottom shelf that were past their date, I have come up with an arrangement where you can see everything on each shelf and EASILY reach it. I do believe this is a user friendly arrangement and products we buy won't get forgotten again. (Please recall that I have another cupboard where I store my pasta, rice, & flours, and I also have another cupboard where I store the tea and coffee etc. If I could ever figure out how to link one of my blog entries to another I will do that for you. In the interim, you'll have to check my older entry called Organized Shelf)
Here is the results of my work on the pantry:
The top three shelves hold snack foods, crackers, dried soups, etc. The baskets and plastic storage containers really help keep things organized and easy to access. The third shelf down is all our cooking oils. It's the tallest shelf and at easy to reach height for daily cooking.
The next shelves you can see are directly under the cooking oils, but they have their own cupboard door.
Under the oils we keep breads. Again, fingertip access for the busy family.
The next shelf is canned goods. When we do a big stock up of groceries this shelf can get very full. We cook with diced tomatoes a lot, and when they go on sale I buy a case of 12. Imagine squeezing 12 of those fat round cans into this cupboard!
The last shelf was the one that gave me the trouble. It was full of beans, corn meal, etc. I transferred most of these items to the pasta cupboard, and then the baskets of items you see on this shelf were formerly the 2nd from the top. This is a much better use of the space here.
There it is! It still looks like a very full cupboard, but we are a busy and active family. We have 3 adults and 2 teenage kids. This requires a LOT of food, and we LOVE to cook, everything from scratch whenever possible.
You can make your pantry organized too.
- put like items together as much as the space will allow
- use storage baskets from the dollar store to create organized spaces within each shelf
- check the expiry dates on products. If they are past their date, let them go
- don't overstock your shelves. We all tend to cook certain things on a fairly regular basis, so stock the pantry for those items. Overstocked pantry shelves just lead to waste.
- make sure you create an arrangement that meets your family needs
Thanks for reading,
Cassie
No comments:
Post a Comment