NewZealandCoach’s Weblog

what a pain. Especially in a smaller house.

A few days ago a friend of mine was standing in my kitchen talking to me while I made coffee. She caught a glimpse inside my pantry and commented on the way I’ve organised things in there. She liked it, so I’ll pass the idea on.

It’s a boring standard corner cupboard, that really needs replacing. The shelves are quite deep and really too far apart to be of any practical use. We went to the Warehouse and bought some plastic containers. They come in different sizes, and are white and grey.

What you do : you use these boxes to categorise the different things. Like, one box contains all your sauces, one (or two, I really need another one) contains baking ingredients, one contains packets of juice, one contains things you need on the table while you’re eating dinner. The boxes mean that you can easily take everything out if you need to clean the shelves, and they keep everything together. The boxes aren’t expensive at all, and it makes it a lot easier when you’re checking what you have before you write a grocery list.  You could do it however you liked – and please make sure you do, because a system that you personally set up will work the best.

It gives the entire pantry a much better appearance too.  No jumble of different labels and sizes.  It also helps the kids put things away in the right place, which is always good.  The daughter likes to rearrange the pantry from time to time, then we spend a month looking for things and discovering things we didn’t know we had, etc etc :p

I should take a photo or two so you can see what I mean. But it’s a good system, not expensive, and partly solves the problem of having a generic cupboard for a pantry that isn’t really efficient.