Pantry Space & Everything In Its Place

OK, so I'm horrible at this continuous blogging thing. But here is a new post for you all.

So living in an apartment with limited cabinets requires some interesting storage ideas. When we first moved in, there was this cabinet in our kitchen that we assumed was used as a pantry. It sits next to the fridge. It is now closer to the fridge and we actually have a new fridge because the one in the picture had a ripped seal so the landlord replaced it.

There are 4 selves in there and those 4 shelves hold a whole mess of stuff. Everything from snacks, spices, pasta, baking items and anything else I can fit in there.

Here is what the inside looks like with everything in it. There was stuff in here that I've never used or haven't used in a long time and don't really plan on using ever again. When we first moved into this apartment our parents went through their pantries and gave us anything they didn't need/want or that they had duplicates of. Needless to say we got things that I or Andrew would never eat. There was also stuff that had past its expiration.

So after going through everything. I threw out stuff that was expired or open stuff that I was never going to use again. Items that I didn't want but were still good were put in a plastic bag and put out for the annual food drive that the postal carriers do. It worked out to be good timing because I did the pantry clean-out on Thursday and the postal carriers were picking up on Saturday.









After all that this is what I had left.

I also cut down on some of the bulky items buy removing them for large boxes or combing items. Like I had two types of Nutri-Grain bars. I just emptied one box and put them in the other.

This left me with a very empty pantry cabinet. So now it was time to decide the best way to sort the items to fill the shelves.

I wanted things we use the most to be at the top and least used items toward the bottom. Also the door on the cabinet happens to pop open a lot, due to uneven floors and a weak magnet, so I wanted to make sure anything in the lower cubbies wasn't going to be of any interested to some nosey kittens.









In the top shelf went all of our snacks and lunch sides. This includes chips, microwave popcorn, cheez-its, Nutri-grain bars, and even the kitties' treats. The second shelf got filled with spices and any kind of sauces, toppings or items needed for cooking. That means Pasta sauce, olive oil, ice cream toppings, marinades, and  any spice bottles that can't fit in my spice rack.

In the next shelf I put everything that had to do with baking, came in packets or just really didn't have a place. This included instant Jello Pudding, Peanut Butter, extracts, Chai Tea (yummy), packets for dips and muffin mixes. After all this I didn't really have anything left for the bottom. So I decided to clean up the area to the right of the pantry and use that stuff to fill the bottom shelf. That meant any soda cans, canned seltzer water, beer bottles and my gallon of white vinegar took up residence on the bottom shelf.

Which made the right of the pantry go from:

This

To This!

Please ignore the dust. :) So this ended up being a much longer post then I intended. Guess you know more about my sorry little pantry than you ever wanted. Have any of you been doing any de-cluttering?  I got motivated to do so after reading YoungHouseLove's week of ORG posts that was kicked off with this post. ORG is short for Organizing, just in case you were afraid of what you would find when you clicked the link.