Over the years we have moved a lot! We have lived in a lot of small places where I have had to be very creative with my pantry storage. Our current house is HUGE for us, especially square footage wise, but it still seriously lacks in good storage, in fact, I am pretty sure the 1000 sq. ft. mobile home we lived in for several years had almost as much usable storage space.
Because of all the food allergies in our family and the fact that I make almost everything from scratch, pantry storage is one of the most important spaces wherever we live. This house has a large open kitchen and dining room, but the cupboards are narrow and don't hold much, so other than one spice cupboard, we have no food stored in the cupboards. Instead, when we were moving in, we were blessed with to rather large bookcase that I immediately knew what I was going to do with them.
They were almost the same size and the shelf spacing was almost identical, so I screwed them together and gave them a paint job. We had a long, unused wall in our kitchen that became their home. This is my main pantry storage.
Notice my little coffee bar off to one side.
I started out with assorted jar, containers, etc... and slowly collected the glass jars. I asked for jars for birthdays, Christmas, any excuse I could think of to add to my collection. The jars were less than $5 a piece, so it was not too much to ask for from family.
I have labels done for all the big jars and will hopefully finish my labels for the smaller jars soon. The jars hold all of my baking supplies, mixes, pastas, nuts, cereal, etc... When we get in from grocery shopping we fill up any jars that need filling right away. Just eliminating all the packaging makes such a big difference. My spices, which I buy bulk, are all in the quart or half gallon canning jars, along with all my spice mixtures that I make myself (apple pie spice, taco seasoning, Italian seasoning, etc....).
Whatever extra we have, plus all of our boxed and canned goods are stored in a little closet at the top of our stairs. This closet also holds my aprons, shopping bags, broom and mop.
