What do I do with a chaotic cupboard?

To organise a chaotic cupboard, you just need a small budget and some dedication.

Kitchens are pretty much the most expensive rooms in the house to redesign. You have the cooker, the fridge, the dishwasher to think about before you even start to think of budgets. Bang goes quite a few $’s on the basics.

I am light years away from having a kitchen renovation, it will happen, maybe in the next couple of years, but it’s not around the corner as my plans are pretty intense. For now I have to make the most of what I have, which is fine, although my pantry cupboard resembled closing hours in Walmart on a Black Friday sale with at least 80% off of every item.

So, I needed to come up with a budget-friendly solution, as routing through everything trying to find the Soy Sauce or Honey was becoming virtually impossible. Organisation needed to reign supreme in this godforsaken pantry, the tins and bottles had taken advantage for far too long.

Sunday morning, equipped with my middle son and a debit card I ventured into the dollar store. Now I know they call it a dollar store and there’s plenty of items in there that are not a dollar but I was looking for a simple solution that wouldn’t cost the earth and put an end to my pantry dilemma.

I had already measured the width of the shelves and depth so I was looking to fit at least 3 containers on each shelf. Nothing fancy with a lid, just open ended storage making my daily routine of cooking dinner a joy rather than a hindrance.

The solution was 9 black basket type storage containers with open handles to pull out what I needed when I needed it. Cost of nine basket containers = $36. Now time to get back to the kitchen and organise the cupboard.

I found these on Amazon if online shopping is your thing – 6 containers if you don’t have a dollar store.

First, remove one shelf at a time. Throw out all of those out-of-date herbs and spices that are lurking in the very back corners. Discard the whole lump of brown sugar in a bag (tip from a friend of mine – put a slice of fresh bread in the sugar bag – it stops it from going hard). Dust off the cupcake sprinkle jars. Gather the remaining items and put them in baskets in a logical order.

For instance, one of my baskets contains, sprinkles, baking powder, icing sugar e.g. all the baking stuff. Another basket has the herbs, oils and vinegars in. School snacks like biscuits, peanuts, sweets etc go in another basket. Rolls of clingfilm, foil and sandwich bags are uniformed nicely in another. You are beginning to get the idea now.

You could label the baskets up but I can pretty much see what I have now.

So a few hours in the kitchen plus $37 and more room now than when I started. No more chaotic cupboard – just domestic bliss. It’s worth the effort.