The kitchen pantry is the heart of the home. After all, that is where all the snacks are! Daily life, however, causes most pantries to look like an untamable disaster zone pretty quickly.
With the right layout from your builder, and a little bit of organization magic, you can design a kitchen pantry that looks just as Pinterest worthy as your brand-new kitchen. That is right. You can design a pantry you can actually use and keep organized.
Built-In Shelves, All the Way Up
The easiest way your builder can help you keep your pantry organized is by building shelves that go all the way up the wall of your pantry. Instead of leaving empty wall space half way up, a thoughtful builder can help to maximize the usually unused space in a pantry.
By building up in your pantry, you can maximize available space and create storage options for things you put in your pantry, but do not use often, like a slow cooker or fancy dishes. Even if you do not use your kitchen pantry to store many things, nobody ever wanted fewer shelves and available space.
Use Your Wall and Door Space
Putting your pantry items into visually pleasing storage containers prevents possible messes and gives your family an easy to spot to put things when unloading groceries.If you have a small pantry, or you could not install more shelves, you can still take advantage of “empty” wall space, especially the unused space on the back of the door. Wall space and door space provides homeowners with a flat surface to hang just about everything from pots and pans to grocery bags to food.
You can use over-the-door hanging baskets to store boxes and potatoes. You can place a Command Hook, one of the best inventions ever that we are not worthy of, pretty much anywhere in your pantry and hang bags full of vegetables or bags full of grocery bags or your pots and pans.
Get the Right Containers for the Food You Store
Investing in Lazy Susans and pretty storage containers makes it easy to see the food you have. (As a bonus, storing your food in visible containers, not piled up in their original boxes, saves space and simplifies meal planning and grocery shopping.) If you start out with a well-organized pantry with pretty containers when you move into your new home, you have built in motivation to maintain your Pinterest-worthy pantry.
Fortunately, nice-looking storage containers are easy to find and are affordable. You can find clear plastic containers — perfect for storing anything from cereal to pasta to sugar and flour — and their fancier glass alternatives at Target or Walmart. (You can also order them on Amazon, if you do not want to leave your new home just yet.) You can also find wire and wicker baskets for corralling small boxed goods, potatoes and onions, packets and jars at these same stores.
Putting your pantry items into visually pleasing storage containers prevents possible messes and gives your family an easy to spot to put things when unloading groceries. Having designated buckets for all your dry goods, instead of leaving them loose in the pantry, makes the adage, “A place for everything and everything in its place,” possible.
A messy pantry makes it hard to plan meals and hard to shop for groceries. It also is a major bummer to look at the same mess in a pantry over and over again. Following a few simple organizational tips can help you tame the clutter that threatens most pantries and give you a functional space that looks nice too!
Do you have any pantry organization tips or messy pantry horror stories? Let us know in the comment section.
After graduating in 2016 from The University of Texas with a degree in English, Sanda Brown became a content writer for the BDX with a focus on website copy and content marketing.
At the BDX, Sanda helps write and edit articles on NewHomeSource.com, writes website copy for builders, and manages a team of freelancers that work on additional content needs.