As we begin our journey to a truly organized home this year, let’s start where many believe is the heart of the family – with food. Organizing Your Pantry is going to help you to stay on top of your stockpile of food if you coupon, but also will give you plenty of ways to streamline the cooking process. Knowing what you have on hand in your pantry at a glance is going to make meal times 100% easier.
Organizing Your Pantry
Purge Expired Items: This is the first thing to do when organizing your pantry. Clear all shelves and discard any items that are expired. Also take a look for items you have had on the shelf for a long time, but haven’t used. This can indicate you need to change your buying habits.
Put Heavy Items On Lower Shelves: This is a good thing to remember when you have kids in and out of your pantry. Heavier cans and jars that could break easily are best stores on lower or sight level shelves. Invest in a can organizer to help keep your canned goods orderly and in rotation.
Put Commonly Used Items At Sight Level: Things like your favorite soups, pasta, spices, frequently used mixes and sauces or peanut butter should all go at sight level. This will make it easy to grab and go as needed without having to dig or search for what you are needing.
Create A Snack Shelf Or Bin: If kids are going in looking for snacks, put all of those items together on one shelf, or even out of their boxes and portioned in a small bin inside your pantry. This makes it easy for them to get their own snacks, and keeps everything together easily.
Invest In Proper Shelving: This could mean a whole new pantry makeover, additions of the can organizers we mentioned before, or simply investing in a lazy susan or upgraded spice rack. Proper shelving makes it easier to organize your pantry for optimum ease of use.
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Putting time into cleaning and purging your pantry will help your household organization tremendously. When weekly menu planning time comes up, you’ll quickly and easily be able to look to your pantry to see which items you need to buy to complete your recipes. Organizing your pantry can be done easily in a single afternoon, or a weekend remodel if needed.
My pantry is an absolute mess right now! During the holidays, I just kind of shoved anything and everything wherever it would fit to prepare for entertaining. This has obviously led to a huge mess in my pantry. I’m going to share my completely embarrassing before picture in the hopes that I will be motivated this week to get it organized. I will then share the after photo with you! {Check out my after picture here.}
If you have any of the hoarding tendencies we describe in this post, you may want to work on getting organized for the New Year. Getting organized and staying organized always seem to be on my list of New Year’s Resolutions. Would you like to join me in getting organized for 2015? Each week we will tackle one area of the home to help you get organized, reclaim your sanity, and save money since disorganization can lead to spending more or missing out on discounts.
Are you interested in actually getting organized for 2015? We have worked extensively on a series to help you get organized in 52 weeks. If you would like to receive these emails about how to get your home organized in 52 weeks, you can sign up to receive just ONE email per week. You can sign up at any time during the year without missing a beat.
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