Pantry Organisation

Something that has been bothering me for a long time is the state of my pantry. With shelves that measure 34" wide x 23" deep, I was forever losing things in the deep recesses of that cupboard. I seemed to always be buying items that I was sure we had in the pantry but couldn't find. This morning I decided enough was enough it was time to do a major clean-out and try and re-organise this cupboard to work more efficiently. First of all I jumped on-line looking for inspiration but most of the images I found were of pantry's that had much narrower shelves than what mine are.

BEFORE: This is embarrassing to show how bad they were, but this is the two middle shelves. It's obvious the two blue baskets are just not working at keeping things tidy.

BEFORE: This photo shows the next two shelves with just a peek of the very bottom shelf which holds the slow cooker and electric frypan. Tea towels in a basket, which just never worked, they will be going back into a drawer. Way too many cereal boxes. That is the work of a  certain teen who gets part way through one box and then for whatever reason that I can't fathom, he opens another one!

AFTER: Much better! This is the first two shelves. I wish the spaghetti jar that is up on the top shelf would have fit on the next one down along with the pasta, but it wouldn't. At least it's not too far from the rest of the similar ingredients.

AFTER: No more upteem cereal boxes! For the last 12 months or so I have had all the baking stuff in another cupboard and once again it just wasn't working, so I moved them all back to the pantry and think this will work much better. I have all the gluten free flours on the shelf above and the wheat based flours on the same shelf as the cereal which isn't gluten free. I also had two of those expandable tiered shelves, so I used one behind the jars of gluten free flour to store gluten free packet ingredients.

AFTER: the bottom two shelves are where the potatoes, onions and garlic are stored along with the container for snacks. The very bottom shelf just contains the slow cooker and electric frypan. Much neater.

With the pantry shelves being so deep the canned food wasn't really working in there. The tins all sit on one of those tiered expandable shelf thingys but if it was put towards the front of the shelf stuff would fall down behind and become lost in there. If it was put towards the back of the shelf stuff would get piled up in front and become a real mess. After thinking about it for awhile I thought the best option was to store the tins separately from the pantry by using the lower shelf of one of the upper cabinets which was just the right depth. First of all I had to pull out all the bpa free plastic storage containers and drink bottles that were in that cupboard. The canned food is much easier to see and get at now, so hopefully this should work much better. You can just see the top shelf which badly needs organising too!

It feels kind of strange putting photos of my cupboards on here as I don't have a nice kitchen like so many you see on blogs. Mine is just an ugly old 1980's cream laminex. It is cream laminex cupboards and cream laminex benches, one word for it UGLY!! It is a fairly good size kitchen, I have plenty of cupboard space and lots of bench space and it is reasonably well laid out so for that I am thankful, but it is certainly not an inspiring place to be spending any length of time in.

It's not a pretty pantry full of co-ordinating storage containers, with pretty labels, but it is much neater and better organised than it was this morning. For the time being it has to do as that is the best I can do for now. There is plenty of food/ingredients in that cupboard and that is another thing to be thankful for.

Now that I have told you how ugly my kitchen is, I will leave you with a picture of pretty much what my DREAM kitchen would look like :)

Image from House of Turquoise

There were so many beautiful kitchens to choose from it was hard to pick just one. I love everything about this gorgeous kitchen. In fact house of turquoise is a beautiful blog to look at, if like me you love the colour turquoise.