Off-grid pantry planner

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I’m pretty sure a lot of people start a new year off with great plans to improve some area of their life. While the new year was just around the corner I did not wait for that moment to improve some things in my home. Before January,  I began working on organizing some small areas of my home and I’m going to show you one of those today.

My simple small food pantry organization

Organizing my Small Food Pantry

I have a really small food panty…actually it’s more like a closet. And, actually I have two small closets on either end of my kitchen. You’re looking at photos of our main food “closet” in this post. I haven’t settled on how to exactly reorganize the other one which holds a little food but mostly a mix of items – and our cat’s food and accessories.

Tips for Organizing a Food Pantry

What got me really inspired to do some reorganizing was watching a lot of At Home With Nikki / At Work With Nikki videos on Youtube. I found her awhile back and have really enjoyed learning from her. I decided I wanted to be not only better organized but to feel motivated by my choices.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to spend much money to make some simple changes that leave me not only better organized but feeling organized! The two basic things I changed were to buy some new attractive (to me) bins and some metal label clips.

Using Pretty Bins to Organize

I have bought my share of Dollar Tree bins to organize. How can you go wrong for a buck, right?! While I still use some of them around my home I wanted something nicer to use as well. I found these matching cloth bins at Walmart for around $5 each. They are quite spacious and I like the stylish print in a texture not plastic.

I ended up buying four of the grey cloth-like bins and two of the paper-rope baskets from Walmart costing me about $35 total. I think I paid about $11 for the tall grey basket from Walmart also.
You can find some nice collapsible bins here too.

My simple small food pantry organization

Using Classy Metal Labels to Organize

Now, if there was any splurge in my reorganization I’d say it’s in the metal framed clip on labels. I have only been able to find these at Target and I have searched online. It does appear they are considerably cheaper to order them from Target online but I wanted them right away and bought them at the store for $7.99 for a pack of three. I think you can save about $2 by ordering from Target online though. I’ll have to keep that in mind in case I want more in the future.

I have a Dymo Tag label maker which I purchased at Aldi on sale months ago. You can find something similar at this link. I really like having  a consistent font (not hand written) for my labels. I also labeled my organizer drawers where I store lots of small items from Sharpie markers to paperclips.

Final Thoughts

Adding the metal clip on labels, the cloth-like bins and paper-rope basket to my food pantry has given this small area some nice textured. I’m still using some of my Dollar Tree containers in there, too!

These cloth-like bins also hide most of what is in them which is nice as it declutters the view when I open the door. The label clearly tells me what to expect in each bin. I do still need to go through and organize my plastic-ware though.

Also pictured above are some of my 3M hooks on the inside of the pantry door I am using to hang some of my thermal bags. I use of variety of these in our home.

*If you liked this post you may like to read about my recent hallway linen closet reorganization.

**My thermal bags come from Thirty-one for which I am an Independent Consultant of. If you’re interested I would love your support! Visit my website here: http://www.mythirtyone.com/tracyzdelar .