Pantry Organization: Taking Inventory of My Pantry Before Winter

Today, I am working on pantry organization. I must go through my pantry and get this back into working order. Preservation season has come to a pretty abrupt close. I'm switching gears and trying to get my house in order before winter.

I like to do a deep cleaning of my entire house two times a year. Spring cleaning and fall cleaning because things get so overwhelming during preservation season. I'm going grocery shopping in two days from a big once-a-month grocery haul, and I need to restock some of my containers here and do some mental inventory.

I know what I have before I do my big grocery shopping and make room for everything, the new groceries that will be coming in. Plus, I know I have some ingredients for canning in here that I'm not going to be doing for a while.

Clear out the pantry and refill staples

To get this project started, I just took absolutely everything out of the pantry and swept out the shelves and the bottom to give us a fresh start.

Now, I'm going to refill my flour container so that I can get my bucket of flour back downstairs where it belongs, and it can stop floating around my kitchen.

I can see my other containers are getting pretty low. I have containers just like this for oats, brown sugar, and rice.

I just took everything out and put it up on my kitchen counter. I'm going to just start making piles, essentially trying to figure out how I want to put things back in the pantry. I want to switch it up a little bit.

Snack organization

I use an old Easter basket as our snack basket for the kids, so anything that we buy that comes in boxes, like fruit snacks or granola bars, we'll dump it out of the box right away and put it in this basket.

There are many random things in here, so I'm going to dump it out, refresh it, start over, and put whatever new snacks I have in here to clear up some of this mess. I'll also take open crackers and put them in the basket. That way, we know to look here first, and if there are no open crackers in here, we can open up a fresh package of crackers.

I also have popcorn here. This is our favorite winter snack. The kids love it for an after-school snack. We do a lot of movies in the wintertime, like family movie nights, and you need popcorn with a movie. So I'm gonna put those in here.

I have a couple of boxes of Nutrigrain bars I will also dump in here and get rid of these boxes. So now I think this is ready to go back to the pantry.

I like to keep this basket low so the kids can access it.

I want to try to keep the bottom here empty only with food preservation equipment, like my Instant Pots, my food processor, and things like that, because in the winter, we do sometimes get mice, and this is where they go, so I don't want to have any food on the ground, just equipment.

We keep frying oil here because my husband does fish fries for us all the time, especially in the winter, so I will keep that in here because he will be using that quite a bit. I'm gonna load in some preservation equipment here.

Baking shelf

I didn't touch that shelf much at all. This is just baking stuff. I do know that I need more chocolate chips. We ran out of those this month, but everything else is pretty well stocked. I always keep powdered milk on hand for baking if I need it last minute.

The other thing I think I might get is baking cocoa. I'm running low on that, but raisins and other baking ingredients are stocked well. I do like to keep self-rising flour on hand.

I have a little bit of potatoes and onions left. I know you're not supposed to store them together, but this isn't long storage at all. This is just for a couple of days. Then we have our basket. This holds bread, tortillas, and all of the snacks that we were talking about.

We like to keep lots of nuts and different trail mixes on hand.

Spice cabinet

I'm sick of opening this door and having spices hit me on top of the head. So we're going to take everything out, wipe it down, organize things, take an inventory, and figure out what I have and need. I will start pulling all my spices down and wiping everything out.

I think I want to try to take all of the bulk things I have, like herbs and things, in big containers and line them straight across and then put all my smaller spices on my little spice racks.

I will try to keep the stuff I use most often in the front and things I don't use as often in the back.

I found some old spices, so I'll get rid of those, and then there are some dehydrated foods. I have dehydrated zucchini and celery salt that I made. I'm going to put those up on the back of my shelf here with the rest of my dehydrated stuff from this year's garden. So this is done, and I'm feeling great about that.

Pantry organization

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to hang out with me and tackle my pantry organization. A clean, organized pantry makes life so much easier. Let me know in the comments below what's on your winter to-do list.