Follow Along As I Declutter My Messy Kitchen

1. Pantry

My pantry is divided into two sides: our main food area with deeper shelves that we use more often, and one with thin shelves big enough to hold a candle, which is harder to open and therefore holds the items we use less regularly.

It is super disorganized right now, as we have been just throwing things in there without really thinking about it.

Today, I am reorganizing it and hopefully it will help me come up with some sort of meal plan based on the pantry staples we need to use up.

First, I organized all the cans and sauces, setting aside everything that has expired or gone bad to throw out at the end. We definitely need to make some things with barbecue sauce in the next couple of months because we have quite a few of those, and they expire in the following three months.

I am not being too hard on myself about all the things I am throwing out, because food waste happens, and I truly am doing my best to avoid it, but it has been hard during this pregnancy because of cravings and other food issues I have.

I wiped down the cabinets and shelves to make sure they are not sticky and reorganized everything I had taken out.

Normally, I have one bin for beans and other grains, another bin for pasta, a bin for snacks and an excess bin. I was able to get rid of a ton of packaging, which is super exciting. I found a few stale snacks and expired boxes of pasta which I got rid of, but I expected to have to throw out even more.

Here is my pantry after I reorganized everything.

As always, I made a bin of grains and beans, a bin of pasta, crackers and noodles, and a snack bin, which we probably need to replenish soon.

I made a separate box for my daughter’s snacks, including her applesauce, her bars, fruit leathers, and fruit cups, which we are running low on.

I normally put my cereal in these plastic bins on top, but they go stale pretty fast there, so I might get rid of them.

There is also a bin for nuts and baking essentials, and another one for potatoes which is empty right now.

I have also managed to keep some space on the shelf empty, which is always great. The pantry looks so much better, and I can finally see what we have!

2. Freezer

I am only reorganizing and cleaning out my smaller freezer today, although both this one and the deep freezer are a nightmare.

To begin, I pulled everything out to go through it and get rid of the items with freezer burn. Then I wiped down the freezer and put everything back, reorganizing things into bins.

One bin holds all of our meat except for sausages, another one is for our veggies and a little bit of fruit. We are running low on a lot of things, which is fine, and I need to check the deep freezer to see where we are at.

We have some cube steak, some ground chicken, meatballs, some ground beef, so we can definitely make some like burgers or one of my cheesy potato casseroles. We have a lot of chicken as well, so maybe we can make some fried chicken or something like that to use some of these items up.

We will just use the rest of the strawberries in a smoothie and the broccoli, corn, and peas we could use as sides.

We have a bunch of sausages so we can make pasta or a sausage and veggie bake. I also have a ton of frozen guacamole, because I cannot resist getting it when it is on sale, so we will probably be making some bean dip or pulling that out as a snack over the next couple of weeks.

The bread bin holds some breadsticks, croissants, bagels, two loaves of bread, and a ciabatta roll, so we can pull out for meals.

And there we have it. We have an area for all of our fruits, veggies, eggs and bread, an area for sauces and garlic, an area for cheeses and meat, an area for leftovers that we need to finish, and finally an area for all the breakfast stuff.

I cleaned out the door as well and threw away a few sauces that had gone bad. Honestly, this was not too bad.

I am super glad with the progress that I have made so far, and I will continue organizing my kitchen, tackling the deep freezer next time.

Decluttering my kitchen

I hope I have inspired you to check how your pantry, fridge and freezer are doing as well, and perhaps give them a cleaning.

How often do you clean out your kitchen? Do you prefer doing it all at once or one storage space at a time? Let me know in the comments!

Next, check out my 8 Easy Freezer Clear-out Meal Ideas.