We started organizing our pantry back in the summer. If you live in an apartment or have ever lived in a small space, you know how difficult it can be to get to things. There’s also times where you don’t have a designated pantry in the kitchen and will have to end up using some cabinets. That’s what we had to do. And on top of that, we were struggling to reach the items we needed and often spices would spill or boxes would get knocked over onto the counter. We didn’t want to live like that anymore.
Below we share our tips for organizing or reorganizing your small kitchen to better fit your needs.
Get inspired and choose a look/color scheme for your storage solutions.
Not only does it make it visually appealing to have a consistent theme for your storage and pantry items, but it also makes it easier to stack and find things. As The Home Edit says, “it’s a system.” Buy storage options that you know you can buy a couple years from now when you are ready to expand your pantry. Make it easy for you to build up from there. We chose to go with bamboo lid jars (we also got our Tupperware in glass and bamboo). For the rest, we went with acrylic storage options. And then on top of our kitchen cabinets we have straw baskets from Target that we got when we first got married. We use those to store our snacks, candy and tea.
Pinterest has been our best friend throughout this organization process. It helps to get inspired by what others have done to their spaces.
Use the same jars, buy your own labels.
The first thing we did was consolidate our spices. We had all kinds of random spices that we only used once for something we made years ago and never again. (When you first start cooking, you tend to be ambitious and get all the ingredients recipes call for, and then as you progress, you end up skipping the recipes with complicated instructions or unnecessary ingredients.) We learned this when we decided to make butter chicken from scratch the first couple months we lived together. We also had a pre-filled spice rack, which we realized was SO unnecessary since we didn’t use half those spices anyways. We kept the spices we used and then bought a set of 30 empty spice jars and filled them with the spices we had in our pantry. We bought labels from etsy for the tops. We recycled the old jars and gave away the spices we don’t really use.
Compare prices on storage solutions.
We’ve been following The Home Edit on Instagram long before their Netflix show came out and actually ordered those copycat lazy Susan turntables from Amazon for our sauces and nut butters back in August. When we moved to our current apartment, we found out we needed another one and it took more than a month to get our hands on one. The first ones we bought were from Amazon since they had ones that were cheaper than The Home Edit product line at The Container Store. While we do love The Container Store and their products, it can really add up. It’s best to look for what you need elsewhere and compare prices before buying.
Only keep the items you actually use, donate the rest.
If you know you only used a pantry item once a long time ago when you decided you wanted to bake a treat randomly, you probably don’t need to keep that item. Only keep the pantry items you know you are going to use or pantry staples like flour, sugar, baking soda/powder, corn starch. You get the point. This is an important point to keep in mind when you have a small pantry because space is limited, so prioritize your items. Whatever you don’t need, either toss away (if it’s old or expired) or donate if you can, or give it to someone in your family who can make use of it.
Here is what our cabinets/pantry looked like before and after we organized them:
BEFORE
AFTER
