My pantry is different from other people's. I envy those of you with a nice built in, matching your cabinets, floor to ceiling style pantries. Or those of you with whole rooms built to the sides of your kitchens that house all your food. Or even with giant closets in your kitchens that act as pantries. I go to other peoples homes and I just stand and stare into their pantries, taking a mental photograph. It's sad. I sometimes refer to it as our "non-pantry."
When Aaron and I first moved into this house it became very evident to me, very quickly, that we needed a pantry. We have a fair amount of cabinet space in our kitchen, but I was having to load all of our non-refrigerator food into one cabinet, and the weight of all the cans etc was starting to weigh the cabinet down and make it sag. I could just see the cabinet falling out of the wall in the middle of the night one night. It was terrifying. I needed a solution and quickly.
So I started searching Pinterest for ideas. Pinterest was a fairly new thing at the time - it's strange calling Pinterest a "new thing" - and it didn't have a whole lot to offer me -- (Of course now it has pages and pages of "no pantry" solutions. Of course.) until I saw this picture from marthastewart.com. I don't know what it was about this precise image, but the idea light bulb lit up over my head.
There was something in that image that made it all come together in my head. So, knowing my budget, I left work that night and headed to the Family Dollar store that was just down the road.
And this is what I came up with. We had this empty space here to the
side of our fridge. It had
housed our trash can (which I removed for the sake of the photographs.
It's usually pushed up against the side of the fridge) and a broom. And
when the idea finally came to me, I knew it was the perfect spot for
something like this. It's nothing super fancy. It's not very visually
appealing, but it's super functional and it works for us! That's the
important thing. Now I'm not going to lie and tell you that this is the
permanent solution to our problems, I'm looking into maybe upgrading my
shelving unit soon. This has worked for us since 2011 with little to no
trouble.
What I did was I went into the Family
Dollar and purchased the units. I've got a million of these things all
over my house tucked into various places. They're inexpensive, easy to
assemble and fairly strong for how cheap they are. I ended up deciding
to buy one 4 shelf unit ($30) and one 3 shelf unit ($20), and I combined them,
omitting one shelf, but using all the hardware included.
All
you do it take it out of the box, lay the shelf, insert the spindle and
screw (no tools required). Do you call that a spindle?? I don't know
what you call it, the stick thang. Screw the stick thangs together then
add another shelf. Easy. I had it assembled in probably 10 minutes. I
chose not to take the unit any higher than the fridge, 1) because it
would look tacky and 2) because it might be too top heavy. Like I said
this isn't the most sturdy piece of furniture you could ever purchase.
After about 30 minutes of moving my food stash around I was done and so proud of myself.
This is where we keep our stockpile of food. Our "extra" food, if you want to call it that. We keep our cereals and snacks
and chips and things that are open or that we use all the time (like
ramen noodles, peanut butter, bread, cereal, chips, pop tarts, cookies
etc) in the cabinet, but everything else lives here. I keep all my flour, sugar, corn meal etc in a cabinet by my stove, as I reach for those all the time.
I
also keep a "bag bag" hanging on the wall here and my favorite apron
hangs on the door that leads into my disastrous utility room. It's an
insane mess right now, let's not even go there.
I keep our weekly meal plan posted on this side of the fridge as well. This is so easy for me because I can stand at the pantry and plan my meals out. ("yoyo means 'you're on your own' for those wondering) I just found this page online - did a Google search - and printed it off. I slid it into a sheet protector and use a dry erase marker on it to write my list. I also keep my grocery list pad of paper hanging here, with a pencil. I got the pad at the dollar store, you can find these things anywhere. As soon as I run out of something, I write it down. Makes it so much easier on grocery day!
So now, let me take you on a quick tour of how I have everything set up.
On the top shelf I keep my large package of paper towels. I buy whatever is on sale, and this time, it happened to be Bounty Basics! And in the little clear plastic box I keep baking things. Cause I don't bake cakes or cookies much, so the powdered sugar and hot chocolate and cupcake liners etc live there.
On the next shelf down this is where I keep all of our condiments and honestly whatever else will fit. Because this is such a small space to work with I kind of just have to go with whatever fits wherever. We keep lots of salad dressings on hand as well as BBQ sauce, bacon bits, gordita shells, taco sauce and tea bags!
On the next shelf I keep all our boxes of things, like hamburger helper, stuffing and boxes of like Zatarans Rice (it's hiding in the back). I can arrange things two deep on these shelves, which I really like. We love the Save-A-Lot instant potatoes... I know, I know. It's so lazy but I could live on mashed potatoes so when I want them, I want them
now and don't want to chop up potatoes and boil them and mash them and... no. I want my potatoes
now. So to avoid this whole shelf being boxes of potato flakes, I keep them in this airtight container. We also have a large bag (SAM's Club) of coffee that we keep here. (We have a keurig, but buying the K-Cups was breaking the bank. We bought the refillable cups and fill them ourselves every morning. Easy, and saves all kinds of cash.)
Here I keep all our spaghetti noodles (Aaron would live on Spaghetti if I'd make it every night) and macaroni. We keep our pasta sauce here, some pasta on the side packets, and I've got all our spice packets and yeast packets organized here, where they would fit. And one lone package of Ramen Noodles. I crunch mine up in the bag before I boil them, and after I crunched this bag up I decided I wanted something else, so I just laid it in the pantry to grab next time.
Canned veggies go here, I also have a few empty glass jars back in the back. I like frozen veggies and canned veggies both and I keep them both in the house at all times. Save-A-Lot has a huge selection of canned vegetables!
And finally on this bottom shelf is where the heavy soup cans live. I also keep our Chef Boyardee type things here. (Please excuse the mouse trap in the corner. Old house, recently bush hogged field across the road... mice. Ick.) We aren't big soup eaters, only when we are sick or in the winter, so I don't keep a whole lot of that kind of soup, but I do use cooking soups all the time, so I run through those quickly.
Not a bad job for $50 and 40 minutes of my night, I don't think. Do you? This
works for us. I am always on the hunt for a more sturdy shelving unit that is the right width, because we are working with such a cramped space. But I haven't found one for the right price as of yet. I don't have to be in a huge hurry, because, I'll say it again,
this works for us. I saw the need, I made it happen!
Do you have a non-pantry pantry like us? Share it with me! I'd love to see it!
Thanks for stopping by again today! I hope you, at least, got a chuckle out of this post, I know it wasn't much, but I thought sharing this - a way to create something where there is nothing on the cheap - would be a nice post to share!
I'm working hard on the kitchen evolution post so hopefully I will be able to get it posted tomorrow, but I won't make any promises.
