To the neat ones, what does your pantry look like?

[mom2happy]

What do you put with what?

What goes high, what goes low?

Do you use canisters, containers?

My pantry is insane.

It used to be a large hallway coat closet. It has two bifold doors. It makes some sense, but it goes very far back and I constantly loose or forget about things and they go bad. I can't put anything in the back that I need access to, or it's impossible to get.

What does you food storage look like?

[bluebackpacks]

The large pantry is downstairs in the finished basement.  It is essentially wooden bookshelves (painted white) lining the walls of the back corner room.  Everything is lined up neatly.  

We use storage containers, large mason jars with re-usable lids, and the vac/seal (for freezer).

[Oceanone]

Oh, well, I would never classify myself as a "neat one", but I do have a tidy pantry!  Only because I just did a bunch of work on it.  I found that putting everything in clear, see through containers, square or rectangle is best for economy of space.  I labelled everything.  I got so sick of bugs , spillages and general incovenience that I just got it sorted.  So far it's working great.  I keep spares of often used things (like flour etc) and empty it into a container when it empties.  That's my cue to buy another.  So I don't go to make pancakes one morning and oops, no flour! Good luck, it's well worth sorting out!

[IsaFrench]

this place where we are living right now is not the best for food storage ... my present solution has been to buy rectangular lid-less boxes that are not very tall (less than 10 inches because they fit two on each shelf of a deep cabinet near the kitchen,boxes in different colors, and I've assigned categories to each box so that if we are looking for pasta or tined tuna or washing up liquid, we know which box to go to ...

+ also reclaimed the side of a walk in closet and built myself a very narrow shelf (3 to 4 inches deep only) in which I can fit 3 per shelf of some platic see through storage jars I had; it doesn't have a back just two sides and a few planks in the middle that keep the two sides together but I got it the size I needed to fit in that small reclaimed space & tied it with some shoe laces to something on the wall so that it doesn't topple ...

[diana_of_the_dunes]

I'm not sure about neat, but I do have a pantry!  

We have a pantry cabinet in the kitchen:  http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h300/prairiebox/100_3485.jpg  It's a little bare at the moment because I haven't brought up items from the larger basement pantry in a while.  DS is at the cupboard-emptying stage, so we haven't been keeping much in the kitchen.

Up top, in the big cupboard, we have boxes of cereal.  In the main cupboard, which is about 5' tall, there are several shelves:

1 - snack foods

2 - peanut butter, jelly, canned and dried fruits

3 - canned veggies, tuna, soups

4 - salad dressing, dried soup mixes, sauces

5 - jars for milk (we are part of a cow share), cartons for fresh fruits and veggies from the garden

6 - baking supplies (I keep open bags of flour and sugar in gallon zip-top bags)

I keep pasta in Tupperware containers, and beans and rice in mason jars in a cabinet over the stove.  Oils and cooking wines are in a cabinet to the left of the stove, spices to the right.  We have a narrow cabinet we use for smaller baking supplies, like brown sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, etc.

We also have a large pantry in the basement that DH made this winter:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cm49P41qLLE/TTtRSZY-2QI/AAAAAAAAAxo/7Sl4Bg8MCGY/s1600/100_3388.JPG

It's more full now, as we are building food storage, but you get the idea.  I'd like to get some of those little plastic racks that rotate your canned goods.  Right now, I have to rotate manually, but it's just part of the putting-away-groceries routine.  Mostly, I have a row of each item.  Every time I grab something, I just move the entire row forward.

[ollyoxenfree]

I'm not sure how neat I can claim to be, but I'll answer  !! This house has almost no cupboard space. We bought 3 upright cupboards from IKEA and put them in the finished basement, near the stairwell from the kitchen. I don't have the dimensions and couldn't find them on the website, but they are about 6 ft. tall, 12 in. wide and 12 in. deep, and there are 4 shelves in each. 

I've tried to keep them organized according to ingredient, eg. separate shelves for: 

- dried pasta and rice

- dried beans and lentils

- jams and preserves (these need several shelves) 

- tinned tomatoes, tuna, salmon, etc. (I don't buy much else in tins) 

- baking ingredients (baking powder and soda, cocoa, spices etc.)

- juice 

- Asian ingredients that don't need refrigeration (rice vinegar, sesame oil, kombu and katsuobushi etc.) 

Oh, and one shelf for First Aid - a complete kit, plus band-aids, dressings, ointments, sunscreen etc.  

[chel]

i have 5 shelves

1 insulated bags for lunches, potlucks, trash bags

2 paper goods, extra stuff -always have 1 extra ketchup, mustard, mayo, pb etc and baking supplies - flour, sugar, etc

3 canned goods and coffee

4 boxed stuff cereal, pasta, cookbooks

5 is at baby level so only stuff i want baby to play with.  usually empty or a few random baby toys, cups, my cell phone

[Baughface]

My pantry is in a decent state of neatness right at this very moment.  :)  My shelves are very deep - VERY deep - so I have to mostly use pull out boxes.  On the top shelf (which has a big slant at the back since it's right under the stairway, I have a bunch of random stuff in no box since the box won't fit the slant.  Coffee, vinegars, agave, jar of nutmix, olive oil, etc. Next shelf down is a big pull out box on one half with all of our canned goods (mostly beans, diced tomatoes, etc), and beside it is our spice turn table and loose spices.  Next shelf down is two big boxes side by side, one with baking supplies (sugar, flour, mixes, etc), and the other box with bags of dried beans (we're vegan so we consume lots of legumes, and dried is the cheapest!).  Next shelf down contains a rice cooker and crockpot along with a couple random items (nutritional yeast, sundried tomatoes, etc).  And the bottom floor contains oatmeal (we do lots with oatmeal for cookies, breakfast bars, and straight up cooked), pasta and sauce, potatoes, the few corn chips we keep on hand, and dried fruits and nuts.