If you have a small house or apartment, chances are you’re stuck with a tiny pantry (which is more like a small linen closet for your kitchen). If you live in an even smaller home, you may only be able to store food in your kitchen cabinets. Here’s some tips for stylishly storing your food, whether it’s in a pantry or your cabinets.
Choose a color scheme and implement the colors in your food, containers, appliances, dish-ware, and/or labels.
Photo retrieved Aug. 11, 2014 from decoist.com
This room has yellow walls, but also uses yellow throughout the rest of the pantry: the color of the food boxes, appliances, and stoneware.
Clean dirty walls and give them a coat of paint, if needed.
This is really important. In order to make a space feel refreshed, you literally have to refresh it. Painting or cleaning the walls is the best way to start. Even if you paint the walls the same color it already is (usually white), you feel the impact instantly. (This tips applies to any room in your home.)
Be sure to remove clutter; throw away what isn’t being used or move them to a more fitting place.
Clutter makes a room feel smaller (and untidy). If you’re holding on to old food, bakeware, appliances, or other knick-knacks in your pantry or cabinets, it’s time to remove them.
Photo retrieved Aug 11, 2014 from containerstore.com
Baskets are great for corralling like items or smaller items that can be pulled out together at once.
Baskets are an easy to way to retrieve your items out of your pantry (or cabinet). Just put like items into your basket, label, and remove the entire basket when needed. One example on how to do this is with baking supplies. Get a large enough basket to hold your nuts, pans, baking oil and flour, rolling pin, and any other tools used when you bake. Label it with a name like “bake” or “baking supplies”. The next time you’re ready to bake, you can just remove your basket labeled “baking supplies” and be assured that everything you usually use is already there without having to move stuff out of the way to get to what you need. Drop everything back in your basket when you’re done and put it back in your pantry (or cabinet) to use at another time.
Reuse old containers, clean them, and create new labels.
Photo retrieved Aug. 11, 2014 from whitneyjdecor.com
The containers in the photo below used to be for garlic powder, parsley, and pepper from a wholesale food store. Instead of throwing them away, I gave them a good cleaning, removed the sticky gook from the old stickers, and made new labels with basic mailing address labels. Then, I embellished the labels with washi tape on the top and bottom. The plastic containers are super convenient, because they’re light (so they can easily be removed in and out of the pantry) and the labels can be easily changed.
Add small artwork if it can fit, if not, include a small statue or decorative cookbooks.
Photo retrieved Aug. 11, 2014 from whitneyjdecor.com
Just because your pantry won’t be seen often by guests, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have a little decorative touch. I love adding small, inexpensive art to a pantry, because it’s so unexpected. The pieces below were old, painted wooden pieces that pay homage to the kitchen’s Italian style.
Let us know what you think about these organization tips! Share with us and make sure to tag #moderndomesticEGL on all your social media photos, so we can see!
Written by: Whitney Jones, Contributing Writer, Modern Domestic & Interior Designer/Blogger of Whitney J Decor