The Great Pantry Cleanout [Peaceful Spaces]

I was honestly just okay with closing the door at the end of the night.

If you’ve been to my old house you might remember this.

This was organized… most of the time.

By now you’d think that I would have everything organized in the pantry and ready to go for meals and snacks? I mean come on, I love cooking, right? If you read my last post about creating peaceful spaces you’d know that we’re in the process as a family of establishing routines that are nourishing to our hearts, souls, and minds. To be honest, it’s been difficult to really jump in an organize my pantry in a way that I really wanted to. Call it … organizational apathy, maybe?

Over the last 2 months it’s just felt like this was one space that I could just close the door at the end of the evening and just completely ignore it. But as we’re creating these peaceful spaces in our home, the pantry is a shared area that everyone uses and yet is the least organized space in our home. It’s like Grand Central Station before and after school with lunches being packed and snacks being consumed. It just… honestly doesn’t bring me peace to look at it.

And so with the holidays literally around the corner, friends coming in from all over the country, and just for our family’s general sense of peace… it’s time to create a peaceful space with The Great Pantry Cleanout.

First comes the actual clean out of the pantry. Everything has to move out in order for me to bring peace to this chaos.

Then, I’ll create different categories of food. I like to separate them into major meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks. From there I’ll separate them into Sub-Categories. I’ll also have a category for supplements because we have a lot of them.

Once I’ve got everything spread out all over the counters and in their respective categories, I just put them into these baskets I grabbed from Target and food containers from Sam’s Club. I don’t really like to use wicker baskets in the pantry. I think they shed too much and they’d be difficult to clean out if something spilled. These plastic ones are my go-tos. And when we travel, they’re easy peasy to stick in the back of the Jeep.

I changed my mind on pantry placement several times through this process and honestly I could still probably change it again. I wanted to make the lunch stuff like bread and peanut butter along with snacks accessible to the kids so they could pack their own lunches, while keeping dinner ingredients readily available for me to use as well.

I used lazy Susans from Target in the corners so there wouldn’t be a wasted space. I decided to put my jarred ingredients back there on one of the lazy Susans because it seemed like it would be easier to reach everything.

I love putting the kid’s snacks into these slender baskets as well as the clear containers. That way if I need to run by Sam’s Club or the grocery store, I can easily see what we need to restock.

Are you ready for the big reveal?

Huzzah!

Now that I’ve got everything in its place, this pantry is feeling a lot more peaceful. I feel like we get through the morning rush hour without tripping all over each other. It’s gonna be a lot easier to make sure that we’re “grocery shopping” our pantry before we go out to actually grocery shop as well.

And that concludes The Great Pantry Cleanout! I hope you enjoyed reading through this little journey of creating a peaceful space in my home.

What’s one way you’ve created a peaceful space in your home? Let me know!