Where has the summer gone?

Before you know it, the kids will be back at school—but in preparation for that, let’s get to something that we’ve been putting off all summer long, getting our pantry back to school ready.

In this week’s blog I’m sharing with you 3 simple steps to get your pantry ready including:

1. How to Do a Pantry Clean-Out
2. The Food Storage Containers I use to get the Farmhouse Style
3. How I Store Grab and Go Snacks for a Healthy and Beautiful Pantry

These pantry organization ideas are time-savers, which help your kitchen stay neat and stress-free when schedules start to pick up again with school—all while staying true to the Farmhouse by Amitha aesthetic.

How to Do a Pantry Clean-Out

If you cringe at the current state of your pantry, don’t fret.

These three steps make it super simple to tackle pantry organization: 

1. Remove expired food
2. Take your overflow products (or duplicates) and store them in the upper and lower shelves
3. Put anything out of place where it belongs

Once I’m done with my clean-up, I start with organizing ideas for quick meal ingredients. 

The Food Storage Containers I use to get the Farmhouse Style

Rather than keeping unsightly store boxes in the pantry, a quick way to make your pantry look good without doing an overhaul pantry design is to store your regular bulk items in food containers. 

In my household this includes lentils, rice, oatmeal, and pasta for quick, easy meals I can throw together on busy school nights.

I know this step might look intimidating, especially when you’ve taken all the dry goods out of your pantry and laid them out on the counter—but this process goes a lot faster than you think, and it will make a huge difference for how your pantry looks and save time in your cooking workflow. 

Storing dry goods like flour, sugar, and grains in clear containers also looks rustic, and clean. This extends the farmhouse look to your pantry, and is much nicer than the mismatched colors and sizes of the product packaging.

For items that aren’t as easy to add to your containers, like cans or glass jars, I group and store them in baskets. This is a helpful tip if you don’t have pantry cabinets as it keeps unsightly packages and cans out of sight.

I chose these natural woven baskets to match the colors in my home making it look more like a farmhouse-style pantry.

Pro tip: Keep these baskets at eye level so they’re easy to grab and so that you can easily see what you have in stock. 

Let’s get into how I store the grab-and-go snacks for the kids. 

How I Store Grab and Go Snacks for a Healthy and Beautiful Pantry

I designed my pantry with drawers for easy-to-grab snacks for my kids. In these drawers, I’ve added partitions to keep the different snacks compartmentalized.

If you don’t have built-in drawers in your pantry, you can do the exact same thing with woven baskets, as I did with the cans. 

The main tip here is to remove all of the prepackaged snacks from the boxes and arrange them in your drawer and bins.

This is important because:

1. It’s easy for your kiddos to easily grab a snack
2. You can see when you are running out of healthy snack options
3. It displays your food beautifully and encourages better food choices

You can finally achieve the pantry of your dreams by not having to worry about how to arrange different sizes boxes like a stressful puzzle and coordinate highly colorful and mismatched packaging. 

My Organized Farmhouse Pantry

Et voila!

In a few simple steps and organization hacks, our pantry is school-ready. I’m so glad I took this project on now, so I can enjoy the last few days of summer with my boys. 

Once you stock up on your most-used pantry items during your next regular grocery store trip, it will only take you about 30-minutes to clean out and re-stock it, just like I did here—I promise you it’s worth it because this will save you so much time once school starts. 

Wishing you and your family a great school year ahead! 

 

Keep using your amazing design gifts to create heart in your home,

Amitha

 

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