Our pantry had got so bad that Chris had purchased THREE jars of peanut butter in one week because he couldn’t find the other jars at the back of our pantry overflowing with miscellaneous items. The moment that really pushed me over the edge? When I was trying to bake biscuits for a work potluck and realised we had five – FIVE – containers of flour in various stages of being opened, one dating back to who knows when.
Another embarrassing admission? I literally post recipes and home organisation on Instagram for heaven’s sake. I helped other people get their homes in tip-top shape and our pantry was a hot mess.
Every time I opened those pantry doors I felt like a fraud. But let me just tell you about the last straw.
The winter snow storm last February where we essentially lived at home for three days because Atlanta shut down.
We were trying to cook with what we had in the house, scrambling to figure out meals with limited ingredients, and I swear we found cans of expired food from our old flat. OUR OLD FLAT. The one we moved out of TWO YEARS ago.
HOW does that happen? I had Chris standing there holding an expired can of tomatoes in 2019 asking where the hell else we needed to go shopping. Pointless.
We were literally buying food we already owned, wasting food we forgot we had, and frustrated every time we cooked. It had to stop. That weekend I dove in head first and reorganized our entire pantry.
And by “dove in” I mean had a panic attack about how bad it was. We had three bottles of vanilla, four containers of garlic powder, enough types of pasta to feed an army. Boxes and bins shoved so far up on shelves we didn’t even remember we owned them.
I’ll be honest. I’ve tried to organise our pantry several times. I would see all these gorgeous Pinterest Pantries with coordinating glass jars and labels telling me this is what I needed to do.
I went broke buying matching canisters from Container Store, pouring money into things we didn’t need. Bought cute labels so I could painstakingly organise everything into those cute matching containers. Maybe lasted two weeks.
Life happened and it fell back into chaos. Here’s what I learned: those insane Pinterest Pantries aren’t realistic for normal people with busy lives. Who wants to transfer everything into some special container just to open, use, and then have to transfer back?
And maintain that? I work full-time. I’ve got dinners to cook, family schedules to manage, lives to keep straight.
How was I supposed to fit that in? The answer is, I didn’t. Instead of focusing on how it should look, I started thinking function.
We cook like normal people. We don’t need to match, we just need to know what we have and be able to find it. I started by emptying our ENTIRE pantry.
I literally mean emptied it. Shockingly we had expired food we didn’t even know we owned. Bleach cleaned two trash bags worth of expired food.
Opened boxes of spices we were gifted from our wedding registry (yes, we’re that couple who still has spices from our wedding.) You know what I found that made me question our very existence? A bottle of maple syrup. From 2018.
It was solid. Like sugar maple taffy solid. I could not believe we let maple syrup go to waste.
Once I actually had EMPTY shelves to work with I started categorizing what we reached for most versus what could be hidden away. Coffee, flour, sugar, rice. Things we use on weekly (if not daily) basis were things that needed to be held in easily viewable glass containers so I could see when we were getting low.
Beyond that, I could keep boxes/packets in their original packaging but organise into clear bins to know what was where. I purchased some plastic bins from Target that were nothing fancy. Simply clear rectangle bins that fit PERFECTLY on our shelves.
I started grouping items by how we USE them, not what TYPE they were. Instead of having all my canned goods together, I made a “quick dinner” bin. Pasta, jarred sauce, canned tomatoes.
When nobody wants to cook but also don’t want to order take out we head straight for that bin and throw together something edible. Breakfast was another bin. Oatmeal, cereal, pancake mix, syrup.
Each together in one place. Baking was another bin. Snacks were another bin.
It sounds silly but this changed our cooking life. I’m no longer digging through three different sections to find all our ingredients for one meal. Everything I need to throw together something relatively fast all lives together.
Here’s another thing that changed our cooking life. I implemented what I lovingly call our “backup system”. You know how when you’re at the store how you have inventory management?
I took that concept and brought it into our home. For staple items that we use all the time, when we get down to the last bottle of whatever, that automatically gets added to our grocery list. No more running out of spices mid-cooking.
No more buying three of the same thing because we thought we owned one (and we actually owned three shoved behind the one we were currently using.) I grabbed a small notebook from Michaels. Nothing complicated or electronic. Just shoved it in one of our pantry doors.
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When something runs low, you write it on the list. Chris isn’t really a list person so he was skeptical but he buys into it now because it’s less Emergency Runs to the store for him too. Now here’s the thing on containers.
I fell into the same trap years ago. Thinking I needed to get every. Single.
Thing. Into matching uniform containers. NEWS FLASH.
You don’t. Do you eat canned goods? Great.
Canned goods already come in uniform containers. Same with pasta- the boxes they come in are perfectly sufficient. Things that NEED to be in containers for me are baking goods.
Flour, sugar, coffee. Things that come in flimsy bags that could be easily accessed by pests. That’s what I got containers for.
Everything else, I can keep in their original packaging. Trust me, I know this one firsthand. We had a pantry moth fiasco a few years back that will make you never want to eat flour again.
If there’s one thing pantry moths LOVE, it’s flour in the flimsy plastic bags it comes in. Once you open it up. YOU HAVE TO transfer anything that comes in a bag to an air tight container immediately.
It’s the law. Well, not the law. But it’ll save you panic and potential pests.
Another thing I loved was having clear visibility on our shelves. We had deep shelves where things would get lost in the abyss. Enter shelf risers.
Guys. I don’t care how your shelves look. Get those shelf risers.
They’re like stairs that allow you to see everything you own. It’s magical. For my deeper shelves, I utilised the bins as “drawer replacements”.
So instead of trying to organise food by food type on my deep shelves, I put everything in that bin and pulled it out. Much easier than digging around things in the front to get to things in the back. It also makes putting away groceries easier because you literally dump things in the correct bin instead of trying to create the Pinterest perfect shelves.
I had to come to terms with the fact that we will ALWAYS be a toss-the-boxes family. Chris will never properly close a cereal box. Just accept it and move on.
Buy yourself some taller containers so those boxes can live happily in there. Also, because we do one Costco run a month plus regular grocery shops I needed a place to store our bulk purchases. Instead of in my pantry.
I utilised some shelves in our laundry room for overflow. Trust me. It works.
Something else I had to accept? This organisation will evolve as we do. When I went gluten-free last year (don’t ask, I’ve had some gastrointestinal issues for the past year that required me to cut out gluten.
Long story short- IT SUCKS!) we needed to make a gluten-free zone in our pantry to prevent any cross contamination. When Chris took up bread baking last summer we had to adapt to allow for all his flours and crazy ingredients. Our pantry works for US.
When I started this journey I realised this wasn’t going to be super Pinterest worthy. We don’t prep meals. We’re not the family that plans out every meal each week.
We’re the family that scrambles to figure out dinner at 6 PM each night based on what we already have. Our pantry works for our lifestyle. It allows us to not waste food as much.
We aren’t buying duplicates of things we already own because we can actually see what we have! It’s been almost two years since I’ve tackled this and holy smokes it’s been the best home project I’ve done.
Better than our kitchen backsplash.
Better than our bathroom vanity. Actually using our pantry, not wasting food, and having less frustration when cooking has made this one of my favourite updates to our home. It’s not perfect.
I’ll forget to place things on our grocery list and go buy them. We’ll accidentally put things in the wrong bin. But it works for us.
And that’s what counts. We actually “sheltered in place” pretty well this past winter during one of Atlanta’s fun little ice storms. We cooked almost exclusively at home for a week because I knew what we had on hand.
No more ugly crying over expired cans of food from flats past. That, friends, is pantry organisation.
