Food Storage When You Don't Have A Pantry

I feel like almost everyone in America has a pantry in their kitchen. Unfortunately we don't and that was a bummer when we fell in love with our house. The good news is I can share how we are creating more spaces for food storage and how we make it work in our house. Let me know if you have a pantry in the comments!

We have a double cupboard we have dedicated to food storage. It originally had three shelves inside but I decided not to put one back in after we painted our kitchen cabinets. I thought this was a great idea but in reality it made more sense to have all three shelves for more storage so I ended up putting it back in this past weekend. 

Let's start by cleaning up and cleaning out! I pulled everything out of the cabinet to throw away anything expired and organize what we wanted to keep.

We have so much candy right now. There is still leftover candy from Halloween and we accumulated more candy over Christmas. I guess we will be sharing with guests for quite some time!

At this point I had emptied out the bottom shelf and put all the contents on the counter. See how much room the bottom shelf had? It was a little ridiculous and I felt like we were just piling things on top of each other and it was just creating a huge mess!

Here's the after! It's certainly not as Pinterest perfect as many pantries I see on The Home Edit Instagram page but it is functional and works for now! With having three shelves there is less room for stacking and that will hopefully keep us a little more organized!

Our basement door is right next to this cabinet so I use the back of the door for a little more storage. 

We purchased this unit from The Container Store back when we lived in our apartment. It worked great in our pantry there and also is doing a great job on our basement door.

It works really well for canned goods and other condiment containers that are unopened.

The last place we are storing food is on shelves on our basement stairs. 

Tim and my dad installed these three shelves from Home Depot and I am so thankful for this extra storage space.

This area is great for rice and other unopened grains.

We also use it to store pasta, unopened chips, potatoes, and coffee.

The built-in shelf underneath holds all alcohol, which we have a ton of and I'm not sure how we accumulated all of it!

So that's how we store all our food without a pantry. It may not be Pinterest worthy but it certainly woks for us while we don't have a pantry! 

Let me know if you have a pantry and how you store all your food!

Have a great day everybody!

Spice Cabinet Organization

I recently watched a video on Youtube that involved pantry organization and I immediately knew that I needed to get my spices organized. This cabinet drove me crazy and I honestly didn't go into it much at all. I decided that it was time to get all of our spices into the same containers.

Here is where we started. I know that many of you would be un-concerned with the state it was in but disorganization like this drives me insane! I hated seeing all the different containers.

If you've been reading along for any length of time you know that the first step to every project is to empty out the space and that's exactly what I did. I also wiped down the cupboard so it would all be nice and clean.

Now as I was cleaning this space out I found a few items that I was ready to part ways with. Did we really need our souvenir cups from a Pawsox game and from Six Flags? No, we didn't! I also had a bistro set that I had an emotionally hard time parting with, but I've never opened it so why was I still holding onto it?! This made quite a difference in the amount of space I had to work with.

When I pulled everything out I made sure to take inventory on what exactly we had so I could consider organization options.

I ended up purchasing these containers from World Market. For $6 you get 6 containers which makes them very affordable. I purchased four sets of them and it ended up being the exact perfect amount I needed!

As you can see above I started off just using my label maker but didn't like the way it looked. So I ended up finding free chalkboard label printable online and creating some labels of my own!

I'm obsessed with how good they look! I love the look of chalkboard labels but this way I was able to get that look but not have to handwrite everything myself. I think the typing looks so much better and is definitely easier to read.

My last purchase was this Expand-A-Shelf which I think ties it all in! Now my spices are all lined up beautifully and I can see every single one!  I am still working on a plan for the other side of the cabinet, I am thinking a lazy susan will be purchased for that side! I will let you see the end result when I have one,

Enjoy the res t of your weekend everyone!