Despite being one of the most important areas of your house, a pantry often gets overlooked when it comes to decluttering. It’s this corner of your home that carries all the eating essentials and yet gets ignored because you believe that there’s nothing to declutter. Everything in the pantry is useful – the spices, the condiments, the juice cans, pasta, pulses, rice, seasonings, cooking oil, etc. Why bother decluttering a pantry when there’s nothing to be thrown away?
But let’s face the fact.
Food items do expire over time. And the ones lying unused for months are plain clutter. Many useful items get overlooked while lying hidden beneath a stack of jars and containers.
Don’t you feel frustrated looking for items in your overly cluttered pantry when you need them the most? Add to it the stress of never having enough storage space for the newly bought pantry staples and you’ll realize that pantry is one of the primary zones of your house that needs to be decluttered regularly.
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Here’s a simple guide to decluttering your pantry in less than hour without driving yourself crazy:
1. Remove Every Single Item
The first obvious step to decluttering your pantry is to take everything out so as to give yourself a clean slate to work on. Keep the items that have been emptied out on the counter or on the table near you. It will help you take inventory of what all items you have in your pantry.
2. Pick And Purge
Now that you have every pantry item sitting in front of you, it’s time to purge anything that’s past its expiry or unfit for use. Pick every jar, packet and container to check for items that have expired or smell odd and toss them straightaway. Now move over to the items that you don’t see yourself consuming anytime soon and toss them in the donation box. You’ll find packets of chips that were left open a month ago and are no longer fit for consumption. There will be spices, condiments and snacks that haven’t expired but turned stale over time. Trash them away.
You may also find duplicate items that you won’t be needing. For instance, if you have accidentally piled up on a snack item without knowing that you already had a bunch of them hiding beneath a stack of jars, it’s best if you donate the excess packets.
3. Deep Clean The Inside Of Your Pantry
After you’ve emptied out the entire pantry, use this opportunity to clean it thoroughly. You may find stains and crumbs that are required to be cleaned at this stage. So, take a microfiber cloth and wipe down every shelf, floor and drawer using some warm soapy water.
If your pantry has detachable shelving, remove it to be cleaned thoroughly. You can leave these shelves soaked in a tub full of warm soapy water for half an hour before scraping the stains off with a scrubbing brush. Leave it to dry before putting it back in the pantry.
4. Start Putting The Items Back In
Once you’ve gotten rid of the items that won’t be needed anymore, start putting the remaining items back in a way that it becomes easy for you to access them when needed. Also make sure that you follow a systematic way to organize your pantry so that every item is fairly visible and doesn’t get overlooked.
5. Store Like Items Together
If your pantry is small and doesn’t have many sections for different categories of food items, you can simply organize it in a way that allows you to store like items together.
For instance, if your pantry has only four sections, you can use each one of them to store items from a particular category. While the topmost shelf can house all the baking supplies, the lowermost shelf can hold all the spices and condiments you’ll be needing on a daily basis. The remaining two shelves can be used to organize snacks and dairy products.
6. Make A Plan
There will be items in your pantry that will soon get expired. Make a meal plan so that all of these items get used as soon as possible.
Ideally, you should have all the ingredients in your pantry listed out on a piece of paper. This can not only help prevent duplicate buying of any item but can also ease the process of pantry refill. You will never run out of those pantry essentials if you have a running list of everything you have in your pantry.
7. Get Creative With Organization
In order to keep the pantry clutter to minimum, you can go for the many pantry organization solutions available in the market. Since my pantry is small and doesn’t have much space for all the stuff I need on a daily basis, I have an added pantry door organizer that has been of a huge help to me. I have also recently bought some wall-hanging baskets to make use of the vertical space in my pantry.
8. Keep Your Pantry Maintained
Your job of decluttering that pantry doesn’t end here because by the time you’re done doing it, your kids will probably have opened the pantry door to grab a packet of biscuit or chips. Considering how often the pantry door gets opened in a day, you need to make sure that the clutter doesn’t get out of control.
In order to keep the pantry clutter at bay, you can simply do a quick clutter-check every time you open the pantry door to get something. If there’s any jar or container that has been left open, put the lid back on.
I hope the above steps help you declutter your pantry quickly and painlessly. Every time you feel that your pantry is clogged up with things that are past their prime or won’t be needed anymore, don’t be fearful about giving it a quick purge using the above steps.