In our current house we are extremely blessed to have a pantry, but in the majority of the places we’ve lived we haven’t been so lucky. When I was planning this series my friend asked me if I could write a post about how to organize a kitchen that doesn’t have a pantry, because she’s stuck in a kitchen without one, and I know many of you are too.
In our last house we didn’t have a pantry but we had a large, really deep cabinet, where we stored all our food and other items.
I wrote a post about it here (and originally here), but I wanted to share it again today because I think it’s a great example. Cabinets like this can be really hard to keep organized (as you can see from my before pictures in the original post), or to find things in, because they are so deep that items easily get lost.
The solution for creating functionality in deep cabinets like these, are baskets. I purchased a bunch of baskets from the Dollar Tree to store my items in, which made it easy to access things in the back because all I had to do was pull out the basket in front of it. You can also get pretty, matching baskets from Amazon, if you want it to be organized and look pretty too. 🙂
Another great idea for organizing those deep cabinets is to take out the shelves and add drawers. This is a simple project, although this might take you a little longer than 30 minutes, especially if you DIY the drawers. 🙂
I wish that I had a picture of our “pantry” at the duplex we lived in years ago. When we moved in, the kitchen had 6 small cabinets (no joke) and barely any counter space. Fortunately there was a laundry room off the kitchen so we purchased a metal shelving unit and created our own pantry. I found these pictures on Pinterest, that remind me of it, because it’s the same idea.
I’ve also seen friends do the same thing with a bookshelf or cube shelves. There are really so many ways you could create a pantry within the space available to you.
Speaking of which, I love what this blogger did, they literally created a pantry out of nothing, check out the before and afters and get all the details HERE.
Ok, so obviously the actual building of the pantry will take longer than 30 minutes but once it’s built it will take you no time at all to organize such a great space!
Here is another great cabinet being used as a pantry. If you notice in the after picture, she used baskets to organize her items too.
I’m telling you, when it comes to organizing food, or a lot of similar items, you’ve got to use baskets because it’s the easiest way to organize them, and keep them that way!
Here’s one last idea that uses something similar to baskets, but instead they’re open, stackable bins purchased from the Dollar Store.
Obviously having a pantry in your kitchen is ideal but if you live in one of the 80% of homes in the world that don’t have one, these are some great solutions, that don’t take a lot of time or money. If none of these solutions will work in your kitchen, or if you think one might, but you have a question about it, please feel free to email me!
I would love to see your before and after pictures so post them on Instagram and tag me @askannamoseley, or you can use the hashtag for this series – #organizedinlessthan30min
If you missed one of the posts in this series, here’s a list of what we’ve organized so far –
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