The Organized Mom Life

Simple organization for busy moms

Our organized pantry

Anyone else have a tiny kitchen? Or a kitchen with no real pantry space?

We have a small kitchen with one pantry cabinet, but not a whole lot of extra space.

And with three kids, we often stock up on extra food when it is on sale, or when we have coupons. We definitely needed a larger organized pantry space!

Which is why we decided to turn half of our laundry room into a pantry. Here’s how it turned out:

I had a little trouble getting this whole wall in one picture, but you can get the idea.

By the way, this pantry was created almost entirely with supplies that I found at IKEA. Scroll down for the full supply list, and links to everything that I used.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This post contains affiliate links, meaning that if you choose to click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Step 1: The shelves

When we moved into our house, the laundry room was dark and weird. There were dark wood cabinets that smelled funny, and an outdated counter that always looked dirty.

So, we tore out the cabinets, retiled the floor, painted the walls, and started shopping for pantry shelves.

After we measured the space, we decided to buy 4 of the BILLY Bookcases from IKEA- 2 wide, and 2 narrow. They fit perfectly.

The great thing about these bookcases is that they have adjustable shelves. We were able to plan out what we wanted to keep on each shelf, and move the heights around to fit.

Step 2: Basic categories

Organizing is all about grouping like items together so that you can easily find what you’re looking for.

Since we had 4 shelves, I categorized all of our food into 4 basic categories:

  1. Snacks- including breakfast items
  2. Baking
  3. Cooking
  4. Drinks

(The only exception was soda cans, which were so heavy we decided to keep them on the bottom shelf, across the entire wall.)

I labeled the top of each bookcase with the category label.

Step 3: Adding bins

I love the depth of the shelves that we chose. They’re pretty narrow, which is exactly what I wanted. You can easily see everything, and nothing gets lost behind something else.

However, bags and small items tend to topple over, or just not look as nice and neat as I want them to. Time to add some containers!

For bins, I used a combination of large and small VARIERA boxes from IKEA. These contain small groups of similar items, like salad dressings, jello, and baking supplies.

My husband loves the bin I created for him with all of his rubs for grilling. And I love the spices bin, where I can keep all of the overflow spices that I use to refill the spice rack wall in our kitchen.

Other containers

I also included a few other types of containers in my pantry organization:

I used 2 large glass jars, both from (surprise, surprise!) IKEA. One is for hot chocolate packets, and the other is for small packets of ketchup, mustard, mayo, sugar, etc. I seem to acquire these things regularly- I guess from restaurants- and they’re super handy when we go camping.

I also had three airtight canisters that I had left over after organizing the corner cabinet in my kitchen (blog post on that coming soon.)

These hold my daughters’ Halloween candy, which we make last all year long- haha!

I also have a few round canisters that I use to store overflow dry goods for my dining room pasta shelves.

Step 4: Labels

Labels are the best way to make sure that your organization system holds up. Everyone in your family can see where things belong, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. It also makes it easy to put new items in the correct locations.

I used my Cricut Joy to create labels for each bin. I chose a bold, clear font to make it super easy to read.

And that was pretty much it! I love how this space turned out. We’ve been using it for a few months like this, and so far the system has held up really well.

I hope this post helps if you’re working on your own organized pantry! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below, or check out the supply list for links to everything that I used.

Happy organzing!

-Laura

Organized Pantry: Supply list

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