Pantry Upgrade (or Why we no longer face avalanches when opening our cupboards)

We have a pretty small kitchen in our house and right now a kitchen remodel is neither in the budget nor wise in this economy. Our cupboards were packed to the gills and we had trouble finding things or even remembering what we had in our cupboards. We'd been wracking our brains to come up with a new way to add storage to our kitchen and when I saw this post by Amber, it finally dawned on me that we could add a hutch at IKEA to this one nook in our kitchen for extra storage. Before our pantry upgrade the nook had a tiny bookshelf for our cookbooks, our pan rack and the kitties' food dishes.


After looking online at IKEA, I wasn't able to find to a hutch that we liked, so we settled on getting this Billy bookshelf. Then when we got to IKEA, we found this Hemnes bookshelf with doors and decided to go with this option instead. The Hemnes shelf was more expensive, but it's made with real wood and is versatile enough to be used in another room in our house should we ever decide to remodel the kitchen or move to a house with better kitchen storage.


Ahh...much better! Ever since finishing up this project, we've spent a wee bit too much time staring at this cabinet and smiling. :)

We culled our cookbook collection a bit to fit on the shelves (we both have a fondness for collecting new cookbooks) and the cookbooks here are books that we use frequently. As you can see, our main cooking interests are smoothies, canning, bread, japanese food, vegan/vegetarian food, and baking.

For dry pantry storage jars we used:

1. Burken lidded canisters in the large and medium size for dried beans, nuts, fruit, grains, seaweed, pasta, and sweeteners.

2. Anchor Hocking 1-Gallon Glass storage jars for white and wheat flour, rice, dry cat food and oatmeal



3. Pint and Quart Mason Jars for everything else that was too small to put into the Burken jars.

I typed printed the contents of each of the jars on paper, trimmed the tags to size and attached the tags to the jars with clear tape to label each jar. We can easily peel off a label and make a new label if we ever have to switch around the contents of the jars.

Now that we have freed up so much space in our cupboards, it's so much
easier to keep everything organized and within reach. It's exciting to
cook again because we actually have an excuse to open up the new cabinet
and pull out a jar of food to use. We definitely should have done this
sooner!

P.S. That bright green binder on the bottom shelf is my organized recipe binder seen here.