The kitchen is often “the heart of a home” and the last 7-8 months have shown how much of an important space it is. With months of restaurant closures, I think I speak for many that the kitchen has become somewhat of a sanctuary as we went about recreating our favourite meals or discovering new recipes.
When I moved into the condo a year ago, I knew how I planned to organize my kitchen. Glass jars and containers were some of the first things I bought and keeping the kitchen as clutter free as possible was top priority. I had a carte blanche to work with and I was going to take advantage of that. One of those was to not keep the original packaging of the spices/seasoning/herbs/pantry goods as I remembered how quickly my parents’ and my old university home pantry became cluttered and you seem to always end up repurchasing things you already had.
I knew I wanted a dedicated spice/seasoning section (it ended up being a drawer) and I wanted to minimize clutter while having enough space for as much seasoning as I need, given how much I love to cook Western / Chinese / Japanese / Thai / Mexican food.
Labels // Glass Jars // Similar Jars from Ikea
I’d seen a bunch of Instagrammers do something like this but haven’t gotten around to doing it until recently. I popped on a documentary on Netflix (The Challenger, the Final Flight), and went about putting this together on Photoshop and then on cannisters themselves.
You can purchase premade labels from Etsy and similar stores; the ones that I liked costed $30 and another + $16 to ship! On top of it being ridiculously pricey ($50 for labels!?) I wasn’t able to customize the labels to add/change up the labels. Here’s where that photoshop skill came handy!
I started by taking inventory of everything I needed to label – this was a good exercise to figure out what else I needed to stock up on on my next grocery run as well. I had 20 or so things I wanted to decant, including a few items that can be rotated out (I have 2 jars for oats so once I finish one jar, I’ll be using that for something else!)
For the pantry, I got jars from Dollarama that cost anywhere from $1.25-$4 for sizes from 125g all the way to 1500g. These jars are dishwasher safe, and I have a total of 20 jars of all sizes to house everything from oats, flour, rice, loose tea among many others. The spice jars are also from Dollarama (you can find an identical one from Ikea) which is something I need to finish up as the second half of the project.
The glass jars with the stainless steel lid fits very nicely in my pantry shelf and I much prefer the screw-top over the lid with wood-top lids with gasket considering how quickly/easily you can lose those gasket. I figure they’re also a bit more secure when handling.
The square labels are from Amazon, specifically the AmazonBasics brand (these are actually specific for office / mailing labels); they’re not waterproof nor oilproof, but having had these for 2+ weeks, they’ve not been damaged being handled per usual. These matte labels are also easily removed should I decide to wash them up and change up the labels.
I like how these turned out – they look sleek, custom, expensive, and very organized in the pantry. It makes the kitchen / cooking process such a joy. Here’s how the jars look stacked in the pantry shelves! They stack up very nicely and looks organized!
How do you organize your pantry?
[…] One of the biggest things about the lockdown and being home for much longer than most of us expected, is finding the need to update / clean / re-jig parts of the house. I’ve big on being organized (though I admit my organization aren’t always the most aesthetically pleasing all the time). Seeing a few Instagram reels/stories recently gave me the idea to update my pantry. […]