The kitchen pantry is usually the last place to get cleaned and organized. All too commonly we shut the door and say we’ll organize it another day. Organizing a kitchen pantry can be made easier with items generally used to organize other areas of the home.
Head for the clothing closet to get inspiration. Shoetrees are not just for sneakers; they can be hung or attached to a wall of the pantry to house spices, canned goods, cooking sprays, small boxes of mixes, straws and small kitchen utensils like a cheese grater or pizza cutter.
Plastic hangers with clips for hanging pants and skirts are perfect for hanging up bags of food items that need to be sealed up. Hang them on hooks or mount a small curtain or tension rod in the food pantry.
Clip hanging racks are commonly seen in grocery stores to organized small bagged items, but you don’t have to have a grocery store to purchase them. Go online to displays2go.com to find them for just under $6 each.
Zip ties are inexpensive and are perfect for looping through the ends of utensil handles that have a hole in them. Seldom used utensils can be placed on hooks in the pantry.
Pegboards are a common sight in the garage to hang tools from, but if you have a free pantry wall, install a pegboard to hang kitchen pots and pans from.
Affix sink caddies to shelves or walls inside the pantry to hold small flimsy packets of gravy mixes, taco and chili seasonings and the like to keep them from getting lost in the chaos on a pantry shelf.
Place office storage bins on the floor that can be removed easily and carried to the kitchen countertop. This is useful for rummaging through instead of staying bent over trying to find something on a lower shelf.
Lazy Susan’s spin around and are perfect to place in the corner where shelves meet. Corners tend to become the black hole where items go and are not seen again for years. So, place a Lazy Susan in the corner for a 360 look at all of your cornered items.
Shower caddies, and some of the other items mentioned above, are not typically found in a kitchen pantry, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Any type of organizer can be utilized in the kitchen pantry, just use your imagination.
— Marla Ballard’s Master of Disguise
appears in the Times-Journal week day editions.
