Cosmopolitan Closets Small Kitchen Organizing Series – The Exposed Pantry

Hi Everyone!  Happy Friday!  I am sure I am not the only one looking forward to the weekend 🙂  The weather in NJ/NYC has been so unpredictable this month, its hard for me to leave the house on the weekends unless its warm!  So what do I do instead?  Well, organize of course!  If you missed my other two posts in this organizing series, you can find them here and here.

I have found that having a small kitchen makes it soooo difficult to stay on track with cooking and eating healthy, hahaha, I mean I can honestly find any excuse to order out.  So in an effort to keep my resolutions, I have dedicated a few Saturdays to organizing. Since we only have a few cabinets in the kitchen that are filled with dishes and pots/pans, I needed a place to store our food.  Now, some ppl would not like food exposed on a shelf, but I figured it was easier to organize than dishes.  I found some great containers in WalMart, Homegoods, Ikea and Target and have linked them below for you.  Check out my pics and let me know what you think!

Items Needed:

1. Metal rack for storage – I linked some options in my previous posts in this series.
2. Uniform dry food storage containers – I have discovered that Ikea has some great options for even better prices.  You can find them here.
3. Wire baskets for storing bottled items – I found my wire baskets at Walmart, you can find them  here. 
4. Other basket options – I didn’t want all wire baskets, so I found some rubber ones at Target, you can find something similar to them here.

Top Shelf- All kinds of marinades, sauces and oils are stored in the wire baskets. I also have mason jars for dry goods like flour, sugar, etc.  See pic below.

2nd Shelf – Great place to store the microwave and other dry goods like granola, chia seeds, nuts, etc. in the Ikea food containers.

3rd Shelf – The rubber baskets hide all the random items like peanut butter, waffle mix, coffee, etc.  Also, I purchased a plastic mat for this shelf so that the microwave had a flat surface to rest on.  I also use the top of the microwave to store cutting boards.

Bottom Shelf – Not pictured has 3 large wire baskets that have more Ikea food containers, plus teas and spices.

I featured these mason jars in another blog post (you can find it here) and they are great for all kinds of things, but I absolutely love using them for dry food storage.

Pic c/o Pinterest -another way to organize a metal rack for food storage.

Spotted these wire baskets in Homegoods recently – $9.99!