Storage 101: The Pantry

This is part 2 of my Storage 101 series. If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.

Disclosure: I'm not about the beautiful Instagram-worthy photos. I'm about real life and telling it/showing it like it is. Take it or leave it. 

There's a house one street over from our house which we put an offer on when we were buying houses. At the time, I really wanted that house for two main reasons: 

1. It had a walk-in pantry.
2. It had a utility room sink.

Not having a utility room sink doesn't affect me much after all. Washing paint brushes in a bathroom sink isn't ideal, but at the end of the day, having running water in a basin is pretty much all the same. Not having a walk-in pantry on the other hand has often made me sigh.

Our pantry, although not a walk-in, has space. It's two sets of cabinets, one on top of the other. In total, we have less than 40 cubic ft of space. After having kids, our pantry was starting to look disheveled with all the snacks and cereal boxes piling up on top of each other.

This was our pantry before I went through and redid it.

By no means is this on the extreme messy spectrum. However, it could have been much better.

One problem we've always had is not being able to see things in the back of the pantry. The space itself is quite deep which is a good and bad thing. Good: it can store a decent amount of stuff. Bad: you can't see it all. Unfortunately, the solution is to not use about 9 cubic feet in order to maintain visibility throughout the space. So if you do the math, that only leaves approximately 30 cubic feet of usable pantry space. That's a little larger than the size of an average refrigerator in 2021. 

I took my storage inspiration from The Home Edit and used clear storage bins to organize our pantry. We bought wide and narrow containers and mixed and matched as needed. It just happened to work where two rows of shelving were the same height as the bins so we could maximize the space.

I had a lot of fun unpacking our entire pantry and rearranging/reorganizing the space. I also followed the rules where most used items are accessible at lower parts of the pantry and/or kept in the front of the space. I tried to move as much of the unused items to the top of the pantry and in the back of the shelves. To be honest, we just need to get rid of more things, but I can't bring myself to yet and we can still afford to store it without creating a mess. Taking from Marie Kondo here in not having to trash everything but simply keeping them stored well. 

Simply more joyful to look at.

After organizing the top half of our pantry, I decided to tackle the bottom half as well. This space is where we store larger pantry items as well as the "value size" refills for various items: cooking oil, rice, bulk cereal, etc. 

A big part of utilizing the space well was removing our paper towels. I'm not going to lie. We had over 12 rolls of paper towels stored under there. When we were a married couple without kids, this worked okay. Now with two kids and a lot of snacks, we needed the space. 

One afternoon, we spontaneously came up with the idea to reuse an old organizer I bought while in college and hang it in the garage to store lightweight paper items, ie: bulk paper towels.

I covered up one of my garage masterpieces, but I'm okay with that.
And no, we did not hoard paper towels. I bought one bulk pack back in 2019.
In February of 2020, I used a free coupon to get another bulk pack because
that's when the coupon was expiring. We use paper towels really slowly.
None of this was related to Covid.

This freed up SO much space. 

As far as organization, I knew I wanted to keep half of the space tall to store our 50 lb bag of rice* and stackable boxed goods. The other half, I wanted some shelving to store round jars and other shaped containers. Originally, I reused old diaper boxes turned on their side to create grid boxes so I could map out what kind of shelving I wanted. This worked out so well I ended up keeping them permanently. Diaper boxes are really sturdy. 

Our lower pantry. 

*Fun fact: Between my husband, my daughter, and myself, we ate over 100 pounds of rice in 2020. 

The storage bins for our pantry reorganization did cost quite a bit, but everything has a designated bin and it has stayed relatively organized. Even three months after our initial cleaning and reorganizing, everything has generally stayed neat and tidy.

We even replaced the batteries in our puck lights so we can see into it at night!

This is how our pantry looks like 3 months after the initial reorganization.
Everything has generally been maintained. No, this is not a staged photo.
It was taken one morning before the kids woke up on a whim.

Maintenance is a key aspect of organization which often gets overlooked. Sure, it may look prim, proper, and clean upon its initial organization, but the true test is whether or not you can maintain it. Our pantry? Yeah, it's definitely been maintained which proves two things:

1. The organization system works.

2. Everything actually has a place.

Next time: Drawer Tetris

Storage 101: The Catalyst

Spending an increased number of hours at home this last year made me realize how dissatisfied I was with a lot of our storage and organization solutions. We've made do for the last 5.5 years in our house, but this past year was a big breaking point for us because so much of our time was spent inside at home, so it unkindly revealed parts of our storage that were not working. 

Now to understand me, you have to realize, I grew up "wrong" in a way when it came to storage and organization. My mentality up until about....last year was paying for bins, drawers, containers to store your stuff was "wasted" money. It was always seen as more useful to spend the money on actual items of use instead of something to organize the items. Sure, we bought shelves and drawers to organize, but that was where it ended: shelves and drawers. What we needed to learn was how to organize the actual shelf or drawer.

Which leads me to two of the big names in storage and organization: Marie Kondo and The Home Edit.

In 2019, we watched Marie Kondo's series on Netflix Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was entertaining to watch and resulted in us refolding all of our T-shirts to stand up. That didn't last and my t-shirts reverted back to the old way I'd been folding them for the last 15 years. In 2020, we watched The Home Edit. I was again inspired to reorganize after watching their techniques. My home reorganization has been a blend of both techniques and mentalities. 

Fun fact: Marie teaches her kids how to be tidy and keep things neat. I aspire to do that, too.

What I took from Marie Kondo:

- Sparking joy: There's a lot to be said about this mentality. I'm not going to get into the spiritual details she includes in her cleaning mantra as I don't agree with them entirely. However, I do agree that there is a sense of joy that comes from a well-organized space. Clean lines and organized containers which are visually appealing bring a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment when the contents are used. 

What I did not take from Marie Kondo:

- A lot of her folding methods to organizing clothes/sheets/towels involve folding on a flat surface. This is hardly possible for me because I don't have a flat surface to fold my clothes. Half the time, I'm folding laundry while my kids are playing. This means I have whatever sofa space is not covered by toys and books. I don't fold clothes on the floor because 110% of the time my floor is not clean enough for me to want to fold clean laundry on it. Therefore, I will pretty much never use her folding methods. Even as a short person, I fold everything standing up.  

I never understood how "house goals" could be a thing until I watched this series. 

What I took from The Home Edit:

- Using clear storage bins you can see through is extremely valuable despite the cost. The mantra "out of sight out of mind" is very true. We do not think about the things we cannot see and those are the items most often overlooked when it comes to storage. Think about your pantry or food storage. Chances are, the things you can't see are the items which expire and go bad. 

- Organization has to suit the daily needs. Frequented items need to be easily accessible. Just because you have 50 cubic feet of pantry space does not mean you can use the whole space because nothing located in the back will be easily accessible if you stack the front all the way up.

What I did not take from The Home Edit:

- Color coding items. They organized books and board games by color. This does not speak to me at all as a person. Does it look cool? Yes, yes it does. Is it functional for what I want when I organize books or board games? No, sorry.

- Labeling: I don’t label my bins. Being clear already, I can see what’s inside and know what the intended category was when I created it. Even if it’s not clear, I can tell what was intended to go into it to begin with. 

Why We Did It:

1. Being inside all the time meant little bits of disorganization and mess left us very unsatisfied and annoyed.

2. It was the cheaper option to maximizing space. We're not moving anytime soon. We're not undertaking any remodeling additions or layout changes.

3. We have the means to. I know not everyone does, and believe me, we've been there and done that when we reused old boxes and cardboard containers to create space dividers and organizers. I actually still do in small amounts. There's nothing wrong with creating DIY organizers. Does it look as nice? No, it doesn't. Does it save a lot of money? Yes. If that's where you are in your life stage, there's nothing wrong with organizing with what you have. 

The Spaces we Organized:

- Kitchen Cabinets

- Pantry

- Master Bathroom Drawers

- Master Closet

- Hall Bathroom Drawers

Follow along as I unpack the spaces we organized and how we did it. 

Part 1: Blind Corners