Ideas for Organizing Your Kitchen Pantry

Do you find it difficult to keep your kitchen pantry orderly? If you are often struggling to find the ingredients you need for meals or you are sometimes throwing away expired dry goods, your pantry needs an overhaul! At A Closet Gallery, we can design a custom-built kitchen pantry for your home. If you want to organize the pantry you already have, however, here are some tips on getting it whipped into shape for smoother kitchen routines.

Take Everything Out

You’re going to need to set aside a couple of hours to get this project done. Clear off a counter or the kitchen table (or both) and begin taking everything out of the pantry. Try to group it all by type: Put the boxed goods together, the canned goods, the juice, the paper goods, etc. Wipe down each item as you pull it out, as things that were stored toward the back of the pantry might be dusty.

Once everything is out of the pantry, sweep and mop the floor and dust off the shelves. If you wanted to repaint the closet, this is the perfect time to do so. If not, wipe down the walls and make sure you knock any cobwebs off of the ceiling.

Go Through Your Items

As you were pulling food items out, you might have noticed some that your family is just not going to eat. Take these, check their expiration dates, and put them in a box to drop off at your nearest food pantry. (Throw away any expired items, of course.) While you’re at it, check the dates of everything else, especially items that you have a lot of. For example, if you have four large jars of peanut butter and two of them will expire within the month, you’re probably only going to be able to consume one before they both expire. If this is the case, put the extra one in the food pantry box. The goal is to minimize waste and get rid of the food that the people in your household won’t eat before it needs to be thrown away.

Put Away the Items

Now comes the fun part, which is to put everything away in a sensible order. First, keep in mind that lighter items should go on higher shelves, and heavier items closer to the floor. Bottles of water, juice and soda should be on the floor. Napkins and paper plates should be on the top shelf. In between, put the boxes of pasta, bags of potato chips, boxes of cereal, and, further down, canned and jarred goods. The idea is to minimize your risk of injury by putting items that could do some damage lower, so they have less room to fall in case something rolls off of a shelf.