An almost complete pantry!

The pantry is done for the most part. Yay! We met our deadline of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving! And I have to say, I'm happy with the changes we made.

I know I said we were working with a small space but to give you an exact idea, our pantry is 50 inches wide and 23 inches deep. The original pantry had five shelves: three were 23 inches deep and two were 12 inches deep. I hated the 23 inch shelves because food just got lost on them and you couldn't see anything on the two bottom shelves.

Our changes involved adding another shelf at the top and making all of the shelves 12 inches deep. We did sacrifice some shelf space in doing this but now we can easily see everything we have which actually increases the functionality of the space. Unfortunately because of the size of the pantry and the number of items we have in it, it is pretty packed. But at least now its organized and we can easily grab what we need. The husband installed two lights which help a lot with keeping things easy to find!

The upper most shelf (accessible by stool only) holds our espresso machine, our large coffee maker, our rice pot, our canner and has additional space for extras if we buy things in bulk. The next shelf holds drinks - this shelf may be reorganized in the future but we'll see. We used a few bins from Ikea and baskets from the Container Store to organize the other pantry items.

The remaining shelves utilize the bins, baskets, and glass storage containers to organize the items as follows:

• Open snacks in original containers (chips, nuts, etc)
• Baking goods (chocolate, cocoa powder, icing, etc)
• Miscellaneous cooking/baking items (lard, marshmallows)
• Dried goods (we have a serious bulk food section at our grocery store and the glass jars hold these as well as other items)
• Quick snacks (granola bars, energy pouches)
• General grocery items 1 (things like dressings, mustard, etc)
• General grocery items 2 (peanut butter, honey, syrups, etc)
• General and specialty grocery items (homemade stuff, jellies, etc)
• Sweet treats
• Pastas and noodles

The cans are a bit of a mess so I'm working on a solution for those. We still need to add hooks to the side where we have additional space and the spice rack to the door. The wire spice rack for the door would cost us probably close to $200 so we're opting to build one instead. We need to add labels to the jars and I'm considering adding labels to the bins. I would also like to add a stacking set of baskets at the bottom of the pantry to hold potatoes and onions and whatnot. Maybe these?

All in all, I'm super happy we finally did this - it is so nice to open the pantry and see things organized!