Cleaning & Reorganizing the Kitchen Pantry

Recently a news article in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. My initial reaction was a detached and casual, "this will be great for an update to my blog". Reading the article only a few feet away from our kitchen, I felt an unmistakable draw towards my very own pantry and it's needs. I hadn't set out to clean out and redo the pantry that hadn't been seriously considered since move in day nearly 10 years ago.

Browsing through the article and looking at the included pictures, I decided to give it a shot. I pulled everything out of the closet, grouping items together on the countertop, and grabbed a rag to clean. The shelves were in dire need of attention, and the shelf heights didn't make sense to me as I looked at the empty cabinet. Rearranging the shelves took a little more effort than I had intended, but making sure I followed the instructions of cleaning, sorting out and purging outdated products, and grouping together like items made a lot of sense.

My biggest quandary was which shelves should be assigned which items. The article suggested putting items that are used most often at eye level. After being in the home for nearly a decade, our children were young adults, and I no longer needed their snacks down at their eye level. However, I didn't want to have the chips and cookies perched on the "eye level" shelves, because I knew that would encourage poor eating habits (for myself). Instead I opted for more healthy snacks at eye height and our much less frequently used canned products on the bottom, hoping to keep my binges on the right side of the track.

I had also added a cool new concept of blackboard contact paper to the inside top portion of the pantry to be able to write notes. On the left is our "Menu" for dinners and on the right is the place for family to write what items are needed from the grocery store. The addition of the "chalkboards" has helped us as a family have more understanding of our day to day kitchen health.