My Food Storage Pantry

I would like to show you a little bit of my food storage.  We live in an older home and one thing it does NOT have is storage.  I want to know what families in the 1960s did with their food, their stuff, their junk.  Where in the heck did they store it???  I have tried a couple different places and I think I have a pretty good handle on storage for food at this point.  I still need more storage but I thought I would show you what I have done so far.  My original place for food storage was the only storage space in our entire house.  It is a little closet under the stairs in the lower level of our home.  It is a pretty deep closet and I have used it as a food pantry for quite a few years now.  I bought a bunch of can organizers from http://canorganizer.com/ .  These are sturdy and I love how they come in various sizes.  I bought a couple different sizes to use in different areas.  In this bottom closet I can use the deeper ones that are 16 inches long and they fit perfectly.  I labeled them and I love how I can just glance at them and know what items I need to stock up on.  Besides canned items I have a large amount of pastas, sauces, and barbecue sauce.  In the bottom I have some gallon jugs of water.

I do need to do some reorganization in here.  There are many things in the bottom that just got tossed in. Oh and you see that margarita mix in the bottom left there? Well, I just want to make sure I have all my bases covered.  {giggles}

In my kitchen I have a small cabinet that I put opened boxes of cereal, a few canned goods that I didn't use when cooking one night, and some open boxes of pasta.  I keep my spices and baking supplies in three cabinets in the kitchen.  This way it is close by and easily accessible. I didn't bother to take a picture of these spaces.

The one space I am most proud about is our front hall closet.  This closet is the closest to my kitchen.  Prior to the make over this closet was a coat closet.  We moved all our out of season coats to our room closets and use a hall tree and wall pegs to hold our in season coats.

In the hall closet we added additional shelves and created a primary pantry.

In this picture you can see that the top shelf holds cereal boxes and are actually stacked two high.  I have another shelf lower than the picture goes and then there is about 15 inches or more to the floor.  On the floor I have bins with flour and sugar and rice.  I also have cases of canning jars and my Kitchen Aid stand mixer.

What you don't see is our paper products.  They are stored above our second refrigerator/freezer in our utility room.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour.  These pictures tell me I really need to neaten these spaces up some more.  They look a bit messy in these photos. But you see them in all their glory.  No holds barred.