How to Organize Your Pantry

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I hate to call him out in public like this. But if I wasn’t around, my husband would totally be one of those people on an episode of Hoarder’s. He’s prone to never throw anything away, and not have any organization to his stuff. In fact over the years our pantry room has become more of a junk room for him. To be fair it is a giant room that serves as both a pantry and a laundry room, but it’s basically where all the items he has accumulated ended up, meaning we don’t have room for anything else in there. And the only other pantry room we have is the tiniest little closet in our small kitchen that is always overflowing. So I’ve needed to do something now for food organization in our house and finally got around to it and am ecstatic with how it turned out. Yep check this out.

Before:

After:

I have no idea why we didn’t do this before. The problem with using this room as an official pantry was the lack of shelves. For some reason I thought they would be difficult to figure out and put in. But thankfully I was wrong. So wrong. So how did I do it?

(1) Figure out what shelving will fit in your area. I knew I wanted to use Rubbermaid® FastTrack® shelving, so I headed over to the Rubbermaid Storage Planner to figure out what exactly I needed to buy for the space we have. This made it really easy to know what to buy, and what I really wanted to do with our space so that we used it as efficiently as possible.

(2) Purchase shelving and tools needed to install it. After figuring out what Rubbermaid® FastTrack® pieces we needed, we headed to Lowe’s to pick them up. I knew right where they would be thanks to checking the Lowe’s website beforehand. I ended up buying several Rubbermaid® FastTrack® Upright Rails, the Rubbermaid® FastTrack® Pantry Kit, the Rubbermaid® FastTrack® Plastic Sliding Shelf, and Rubbermaid® FastTrack® Wire Sliding Tiered Shelf.

(3) Clear out the space. Clearly with boxes and bags filling the area I couldn’t install the shelving. So first a foremost I had to clear out some junk. I like to believe that everything has a special place where it should “live”, and clearly my husbands junk either had to find that place for it, or go in the trash. I love throwing things away so I thought this was the best part. My husband didn’t, but he’s happy now that we were able to clear out this room.

(4) Install the Shelves. I chose Rubbermaid® FastTrack® largely because of how easy to install they are. With a little (okay a lot) of help from my husband we had everything up in very little time, meaning we could get back to our crazy kids.

(5) Organize pantry items onto shelves. I started by moving over the big items. Bins of coffee, packages of drinks, things in larger boxes. I even went so far as to put some appliances on the shelving so that they weren’t taking up room on our kitchen counters, which are also rather cluttered. Some of these things, like the crock-pot, are pretty heavy, and the shelves can hold them with no problem.

I am such a big fan of Rubbermaid® FastTrack® and would recommend it to anyone wanting to add organization to a pantry, laundry room, linen closet, utility room, and more. This system is adjustable, made of all steel, and customizable to match your storage needs! Rubbermaid also makes a similar system called Homefree for closet bedrooms!

Don’t forget to check out the Rubbermaid Storage Planner to see what Rubbermaid FastTrack can do for your home. What are your tips for pantry organization? Would love to hear them below!