I DECLUTTERED, ORGANIZED & TRANSFORMED MY KITCHEN PANTRY!

Do you have a space like this in your house where when you open the door, you just want to quickly close it and pretend it doesn't exist? Well, this is the space in our house. This is a pantry that we never really had a designated purpose for when we moved in and it's been a catch all ever since. Today I'm going to pull everything out, I'm going to declutter it, and I'm going to organize everything so that I can put it back and make this an extremely useful pantry for us and we make better use of the space. I hope that by hearing how I go through this process, it'll help inspire you to tackle your project as well. I know this looks really intimidating, but it's okay.

I will tackle this one item at a time.

The first step is to put like items together. Once you've done that, then decide what needs to be kept and where to best store it. I started with the cleaners. After sorting through the cleaners, I found that I had cleaners that had nothing to do with the kitchen and I found extra cleaners that I didn't need. I specifically set aside the few cleaners and cleaning products that I wanted to keep in the kitchen. All of the others I put in a bin so that we can store them in the garage in a designated space for all of our extra cleaning supplies.

Okay.

I have made it through all of the different piles. I've sorted through everything, made decisions on what to keep, how I want to store it, and where I want to store things. I also have things that are going to be leaving the house I'm going to give away and donate or their trash. I will walk you through some of my thought process and how I made decisions. So hopefully it'll help you make decisions for your own stuff in your space. At our house, if anybody wants a battery, they know they need to look for the yellow container. The yellow container has been in this closet, but now I'm going to move it to a different location because it doesn't belong in the kitchen and I can use the space it was taking up for something else that does belong in the kitchen. Now, I absolutely love our ice cream maker, but we just haven't been using it. So with that, as well as this spare container that my son has for his smoothie maker, he has another one and this one has some crazy blades. I don't even know what it's used for, but he doesn't use this particular pitcher. I'm going to store both of these in a linen closet where we have extra space for small appliances that we don't use on a regular basis. I want to make sure and keep them. I just don't need to have them in this small pantry taking up space because we aren't going to use it on the regular. I got this new supply caddy from Target. It was in the dollar section. I think it was like four or five dollars. And it's perfect for this space. I want to make sure and have some office supplies. I don't need a lot, but I need just a little bit, so I want to make sure. We have pens, we have post its, we use rubber bands, we have scissors, stapler, tape, and we also have somewhere for our spare keys and that's all we need for office supplies. We don't need packing tape, we don't need glue, we don't need extra staples. We don't need a whole bunch of tapes. We have about five things of tape. We don't need all those stored in the kitchen. We don't need wet ones. We have some already stored. And I do want to make sure and keep this pencil caddy that my daughter made, but I'm going to use that in my office. It's a perfect fit, so I'm happy about that.

This dinosaur was left over from a.

Birthday party and he's just been hanging out in this closet, so. So I feel like I need to find a purpose for him in the new closet. So maybe he'll be our new mascot.

With the whole pandemic and everything. We ended up with so many bags because we couldn't reuse them. So they just kept piling up because I feel guilty not using them. But it's just clutter at this point. So this is going to be the bag. This is a bag of plastic bags that I'm getting rid of. These are the ones I'm going to keep because I do want to keep some. So I've got a plastic bag, I've got a container, and we'll never keep any more that fit in this container. So if it fills up, then we no longer keep them. But we reuse our bags now because we're allowed to, so that shouldn't be an issue. These I'm going to take to a local food bank and whatever they can use, they can use, which is great. Otherwise they'll get recycled. Now for the paper bags, I have the same. Same situation. Here's my bag of paper bags.

You can see how many we have.

We have so many. And again, it's all Left over from the pandemic. So I've created a similar container which has paper on it. I've folded these up. We do reuse these sometimes, so I want to keep those. But we will not keep any more than this. This is. This is what will be allowed in the space. So we should not accumulate anymore. We should not store anymore. So that's the plan with the baggies. Now for our reusable bags. These are some of the reusable bags. We keep a lot of them in our car, but here's a few. We should never have any more than this. We don't need any more. So we have a container, it says reusable. It'll be stored with the other bags, and people can grab these as they need it if they're heading out to the store or whatever they're doing for the day. And they could easily grab one. Okay.

So what we were storing, we had.

A whole bunch of tin foil. We use tin foil regularly. Right. So we have some single sheet ones from Costco. Here's a container of just regular Reynolds wrap parchment paper I use, but this is an extra one. We have four things of plastic wrap. We had that for a holiday activity that we were doing. We bought some extras, and we didn't use it all. But I never use plastic wrap ever. So I'm going to give some of these away, and then these are going to go in storage because this is what I'm going to have inside my closet. If you haven't seen these or used these, they're absolutely amazing. So this has all my baggies in it. It's so easy for everybody to find things. You're not sorting through a bunch of boxes and they're getting put away messy. Everything is here, and it's easy for me to see what I need to get. And then similarly, I've got my foil, my wax paper, and my wax paper is where I keep parchment paper and then plastic wrap. So this is all I'm going to store inside the pantry. Just these beautiful boxes. And the rest of it will either be given away or put in the back stock. So we can refill these other items later down the road. I definitely will link where you can get these. These are gorgeous. Shout out to them. It's a beautiful product. It's made very well. And I'll put a link. So if you're interested in getting those, you can get them. Okay. For the miscellaneous, we had a couple cookbooks, and then we mostly had manuals for some of our kitchen appliances and a Couple cookbooks. So what I did was I got a small container, put cookbooks on it. It does have, you know, manuals in it too, but that's fine. But this will be how I'm going to organize all of these so they're not just floating around in space inside the pantry making a mess like they were. And we can find what we need. And this will be all of them that we're going to create here. I do that we're going to store here. I do have others that I store, but I store them on a bookshelf. But this is all that's going to be inside this particular pantry. Okay. Another category of items that I had kind of fell under the party, you know, napkins, plates for parties, serving spoons, even some balloons and various other things. So what I did was I got them all together and these are going to. I'm going to store with all of my party planning stuff. And what I did was I created a basket for inside this cabinet that just has, you know, some paper plates. We don't use them very much, but we have them. So paper plates. There's some plastic utensils and some wipes, like hand wipes. Like if you're going on a picnic, those are in here. So there'll be a small basket in this closet dedicated to kind of take out or if we want to go eat out in the backyard and grab something or go to a picnic, we'll have easy access to this, the party stuff. And the extra forks, knives and spoons will be stored outside in an area where I have some of the overflow stuff that fits for that category. Now, inside this pantry we had a bunch of medications or mostly for mostly supplements, but these are all expired, so some of them are mostly used, some aren't. But what we're going to do is I'm going to make sure that these get taken to a pharmacy where they can be properly disposed of. And we're definitely not going to keep anything like that in this pantry. It should be kept in where all those we keep in our linen closet. In our linen closet we have an area where we keep all of our medicines and supplements. So that's where this type of stuff should be stored. Not inside a pantry where it gets lost. So this is going to go to the pharmacy so we can properly dispose of these. It SAM okay, for this shelf I have our water bottles stored here. I have nine. So I kind of have a three by three configuration. And this is just a nice way for me to move these out of an area that's kind of. It was really inconvenient to get to these, and they were always falling over in the location that we had them in. It was kind of a corner cabinet. So I love this. We can easily grab them and store them. I thought another way of doing this. These are just individual little wine bottle holders that I got from the container store. But another way to do this would be to get a small wine rack. And you could probably get one out of wood or metal and use that instead. May even be less expensive. You can get one at a thrift store, garage sale, or Target home goods. But that might be a nice way of doing this as well. Just to get a small wine rack. Here's our stationery supplies. And I already kind of went over that with you. This is nice and tidy and easy for people to access. Over here we have some small appliances that we use on a regular basis. So these are easy to get to and put back, so they have a home. This shelf is dedicated to overstock food storage, just like up above. So this has got extra pasta that we have. Again, we bought some at Costco and there's so much. And my daughter's the only one that really eats it because we're gluten free. The rest of us are gluten free, so we'll have that. So she has this for all her pasta. Here's some extra condiments that we have that we store here. And then here's some coffee and some granola. And so it's just basically a way for us to have overstock and a place to put our groceries.

So if we run out of something.

We know where to grab the next container.

Okay, here's.

This is basically a shelf designated to our small appliances. I've got my crock pot, my ninja. We use this almost daily, all the time. This is my son's smoothie machine. And all the parts are back there in a container. And so they'll. They're there. He needs them. The different attachments and lids. And here's a couple cups for him to use, so that's easy. And he has access to that. Okay. On this shelf, so I have my foil, wax paper and my plastic wrap. Again, I absolutely love this in the baggie holder. These are awesome. Check the link and order these. Great quality and you will not regret it. And over here, the magic bullet for my husband's smoothies. He likes that one. So anyhow, we have that and he knows exactly where to put it. And here's some. Some Empty space, which is dangerous because people can put whatever they want there. So I have to figure out what's going to go right here. But that's okay to have empty space. Okay, I think I showed you. This is where we have our extra paper plates and, like, the plastic knife, organ spoons, and stuff like that. So that's in a little basket there if anybody wants it. And here's all the bags that I had showed you. So we have the reusable bags.

We have.

These are our garbage bags, paper bags, plastic bags, and there's our cookbooks over there. So everything kind of has a home, and it all fits nice and tidy in there. Okay, so here's my bottom shelf. And you know, the beauty of decluttering and organizing your own home is that you can do whatever you want. There's no rules, and there's no pantry. That will be like another pantry. Right. So. So I wanted a place for my shredder. We use it downstairs. I don't want to store it upstairs. Like, our mail comes in. You know, part of being making sure I keep a handle on my. My clutter is, you know, mail gets handled as soon as it comes inside. And if we have something we want to shred, I want to be able to shred it. So my shredder's in here.

We have power.

So it's nice. It's all in here. I ran the power up, and the cables are all nice and tidy. So this is a game changer. I'm so happy to finally have this in here. Downstairs, here's some extra small appliances. That's my food saver and our waffle maker. There's my tools. So I don't know if any of you out there have your own set of tools, but this is mom's tools, so they do. People in the house do use them, but they know these are mom's tools. Because I hate going out into the garage and not being able to find.

What I'm looking for.

So I always love to have my own tools, Little set of tools. So that's pretty much it. I'm so happy with how this. This pantry, whatever you want to call it, closet, pantry. It's pretty much a pantry, I guess how it turned out. It serves all of the things that I needed it to. And again, it's unique to me because, you know, I wanted to have certain things in here. And I hope that you're inspired to, you know, tackle some of your spaces and get know when you're looking at redoing the space like this, you know, try to, you know, add in some of those things that are, you know, kind of some pain points that you've been wanting to take care of. Like, for me, I wanted to, you know, my shredder or I wanted somewhere to store my water bottles or, you.

Know, whatever it is.

Right. You know, take an opportunity to try to find out how you can incorporate some of these pain points and actually offer solutions so that they're no longer your pain points anymore. So I hope this was helpful. Please give me any comments, let me know what you think or what you would do differently. I'd really appreciate it. And you know, I'll continue to use this, this pantry and who knows, you know, it might change in a couple months because the way that we need to use it needs to change. And that's fine. Right? This is all modular and easy to use. So, anyhow, thanks for joining me today and I really look forward to the next project project. So please subscribe and I'll see you next time. Bye.

Here's a link to my food pantry makeover. It's a good one.