Pantry and Kitchen Organization - Dear Lillie Studio

spice jars / spice labels / tall oil and vinegar jars / wider oil and vinegar jars / label paper for custom labels

Good morning! Pretty much every January I do a good amount of organizing. I like starting the new year off with things in order. This usually means cleaning out closets, our fridge and and our pantry. In this house I hadn’t tackled properly organizing our pantry yet so I decided to go ahead and do that. Although I am not a huge fan of the existing shelves I decided to go ahead and just use them and just painted the walls with the leftover paint from our powder room makeover. This kept the project free and I was also tackling a building project in our laundry room and building some shelves in a skinny little closet (shown further down in this post) so I was glad I just kept these existing shelves for now. I’ve been slowly buying canisters and jars over the last five to ten years so we had pretty much everything already except for the round glass jars with the wood tops which I got at Target (I do have all the sources listed at the bottom of this post because many of the items are still available).

Our pantry isn’t all that large and we had that really skinny closet right next to the kitchen (and very near the pantry) that pretty much just fit a broom in it so I decided to paint it the same leftover paint that I painted the pantry and then go ahead and build some shelves in it and utilize it to give us a tiny bit more pantry space.

I love these salt and pepper grinders that look pretty being left out on our counter! And this new Grecian Face Planter is a fun little addition to our kitchen. Can you believe these tulips are faux? I bought two bundles of them and have them here and in our laundry room too!

Faucet / Soap Bottles / Footed Wood Tray / Towel / Bowls / Planter / Tulips / Salt and Pepper Grinders

Because I was tackling our spice cabinet and rebottling some of our oils and vinegars I also decided to use two of the bottles for my flavored coffee syrups. I saved money by making my own labels and printing them on this paper (I did that for the pantry items as well) but you can also find similar ones on Etsy. I got these gold toppers for the bottles but they didn’t come until after I had taken these photos.

Here are some more pantry photos. It is so much easier to keep out pantry organized when it look visually appealing. Also we’ve been asked quite a bit over the years about our thoughts on putting things in clear containers. First, yes, it does take a bit more time when you are unloading the groceries to then fill up the containers. That being said, it is worth it to me because I have found that we waste so much less going this route. It is so much easier to see what we actually need so we don’t overbuy, and things stay fresher this way versus when kids don’t properly close cereal boxes or pretzel bags and therefore we almost never have to throw away half-eaten bags of things. We started doing this years ago and haven’t looked back! The fact that it looks so much better doesn’t hurt either! I wouldn’t continue storing our items this way though, if it didn’t also work well for our family. This is definitely one of those spaces where both form and function go hand-in-hand.

I used the same blank labels as I did for our oils and coffee syrup to make ones for our flour, sugars, and oats. (You can find similar pre-made ones on Etsy).

While I was painting and organizing our pantry I also decided to tackle our spice cabinet. I have been wanting to switch our spices over to some pretty jars for years and finally did it. I ordered these 6 oz. jars with the bamboo lids and then these labels. I ordered these before I decided to make the custom ones for our other items otherwise I probably would have made these labels as well. I also got some oil and vinegar jars from Amazon and Target and a cute little vanilla jar from Hobby Lobby and then made custom labels for all of them.