Please help me organise my food cupboard

[K12Mom]

My food cupboard is about 6 feet tall and about 3 feet wide. It is big enough for all our food, but it is a mess. I have just taken everything out and cleaned the cupboard and now I need to put everything back.

The thing is, I am not very good at placing things logically, and I don't think it will be any different than before I took everything out.

I am very frustrated and just want to go and pour myself a nice glass of wine and forget all about it. But I so want it to be all tidy and organised.

Can someone give me some tips, please?

Thanks so much!

Things you dont use every day like soy sauce, chilli sauce, oil, condiments etc should go on the top shelf.

Pasta, rice, couscous on next shelf

tins of tomatoes, beans, tuna on next shelf

Cereal at children level so you can train them to get their own breakfast without you getting out of bed. (leave bowls and spoons on table and put milk in a little jug in fridge to lessen spillage!)

Baking things like flour, sugar, icing sugar at the bottom.

What have I left out?

That is really helpful Rupreckt, thank you! If you have further suggestions, I would love to hear them!

Well tell me the foods you have to organise and I shall be even more useful!

Is it one huuuuge cupboard for everything and how many shelves does it have?

Put like with like. That's the whole concept, really. Frex:

Put all your tins together and tins of the same things together: fruit, beans, tomatoes, soup, etc.

Put all your dried goods together.

Put all the cereals together and any other breakfast things together.

Put all the hot drink kit together: teabags, coffee, sugar, hot chocolate.

And so on.

Thanks girls. So, I've got 4 shelves. We have the usual kinds of foods: baking, 17 packets of different pasta half-used, same with rice, tins of stuff, boxes of cereal, etc.

Do you all decant your flour etc. into other containers? I worry about mice (although we're on the 31st floor, so don't know how likely that is!).

Also, I've got all my spices in drawers. Every time I need a spice, I have to rummage through all the bottles and packets. It's a real pain, there's got to be a better solution, surely?

Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate this.

I would get a basket and put all the spices in there so you can just pull out the basket and rummage that way.

I have some nice Jamie Oliver storage jars for rice and pasta but basically keep everything in the original packets.

K12Mom, sounds like you could do with the cure actually.

I put practically everything in storage containers because it is so much easier to keep tidy. It doesn't have to be madly expensive - you can get Le Parfait type jars from IKEA. (Transparent ones are best because you can see what you have.) At Christmas you can use empties to store any Christmas pickles or baking etc - v handy.

My spice drawer was always a mess and I had ludicrous quantities that lost their flavour before I ever used them. Now I keep the little glass jars that some spices come in and put new labels on. In my spice drawer I have them (laid flat) racked on these rubber racks so I can see exactly what I have. A drawer insert of any kind would help divide up your bits and pieces.

The other thing I do recommend if you're going to a storage shop is getting pull out drawers you can fix to the inside of a cupboard. I have a long thin one plastic that I keep all my flour in on my baking shelf because I kept getting honey or treacle gunging up the packets.

This post seems like an advert for IKEA. But the thing is you have to tidy up so much less if you design for your habits properly in the first place!

Dode, where can you get those pullout drawers for attaching inside a cupboard?

This was a good idea for a thread K12mom

Yes to dode or use recycled plastic trays and boxes to put yr spice jars standing up in the cupboard to compartmentalise it. I do that for everything in my cupboards.

Arabella, I got mine from IKEA but they're not on the website. They were a few quid (less than a tenner). But you can get them from lots of places I think.

I use these

You can see everything easily.

Thanks for all your help, girls. My food cupboard now looks great! I keep opening it to look at all our nice and tidy food. I also found a few things that were out of date, to my shame.

I wish I could upload a photo. How do we share photos on Mumsnet?