Organizing the pantry
After weeks of garden posts, something with a drawer in it.
Enough decking and planting. Back indoors, to the pantry, which had been quietly getting worse for about a year.
There is no before photograph, and that is not modesty. I was so pleased to be starting that I emptied the whole thing onto the worktop before it occurred to me. Picture flour, sugar, grains, pasta, rice, and about nine part-used bags folded over and clipped, none of which stand up.
Matched containers, which are not cheap
I bought a set of clear containers with white lids, in three sizes, and I bought enough of them, which is the expensive part. Some birthday money went on it. This is what I consider a good time.
Three sizes was deliberate: one size for each thing that comes in a standard bag or box, so nothing gets decanted into a container it half fills. A pantry full of half-empty containers looks worse than the bags did.
They open with one hand, a little lever at the top of the lid releases it, which sounds like a detail and is the reason they actually get used rather than admired.
What stayed as it was
The lazy Susan of spices came over from the old house and did not need touching. A number of the glass jars I already had went back in as they were, holding the things that look good in glass.
Not everything has to be replaced for a system to work. The point was the dry goods that came in bags, not the things already living in something.
Labels
Printed on a handheld labeller, plain, contents only. They go on the top of the lid, not the front. Black print on a white lid, read from above, which is how you look at a shelf of containers when you are standing under it.
Getting two rows out of one shelf
The shelves are deep enough that anything at the back is invisible and therefore does not exist. On one of them I put a narrow wire shelf riser: large containers in two rows underneath, small ones on top.
That single shelf holds about half again what it did, and everything on it can be seen without moving anything else.
The top shelf
Needs a chair, so it gets things I want twice a year. Cookie cutters in old tins, mostly.
The rule that has survived: reach determines contents. Waist to shoulder is everyday, above that is occasional, and the chair shelf is for things I would otherwise have thrown away and missed.