Pantry Organization - DIY Storage Containers from Cardboard Boxes

Pantry Organization - Make Something from Nothing

Welcome to the first edition of Make Something From Nothing - Craft Stash Challenge.  Please join me, Diane from An Extraordinary Day and Jennifer from Celebrating Everyday Life as we share creative ideas monthly that you can easily copy to Make Something From Nothing.  This month is the Kitchen Organization Edition.

Next month our theme will be Valentine's Gifts.

It will be an exciting adventure, thinking outside the box, to organize and decorate our homes with what's leftover and maybe even considered trash. Who knows what we'll create. Whatever it is... we're going to have fun sharing how you, too, can Make Something From Nothing.

I hope you'll plan to join us each month.

AND... we're doing something a little bit different.

We're inviting YOU to take the challenge, too, and link up an image of what you made to organize your kitchen.

Your image should be clear for everyone to see. I would suggest posting it on Facebook (I haven't tried Instagram but that might work, too) with a description of what you did and using the hashtags #makesomethingfromnothing #msfn

If you have a blog, you can link up below to our monthly party but even if you DON'T have a blog it's easy to share your ideas - if you're not sure how to do that, Diane explains it all right here - just click and be taken to the instructions.  We truly hope you'll join us as we explore and share our ideas....ideas using just what you have on hand!

Making something from nothing, or next to nothing, always appeals to me.  Recently, I switched things around in my home, just a few little things, but it has made a huge difference.  One of the things I switched up was removing my pantry from my kitchen.  Now, by pantry I mean a cabinet I bought years ago to use for baking supplies.  

The cabinet was tall, probably 58 inches (I'm 5' 2" so that's tall to me!).  This picture was taken after I already had it moved from it's previous spot - it didn't normally sit in the middle of the kitchen like this but you get an idea of what it looked like....mess and all!

I moved an antique dresser from the living room into the kitchen to use as my new "pantry".  At first, I wasn't sure how it was going to work out but I absolutely love it! The dresser has a much lower profile and I can now see into my dining room and part of my living room.  It has opened up the entire space so much.  My goal is transition my home into a much more open, non-cluttered, inviting space spending as little money as possible.  This swap cost me absolutely nothing and for as far as how it works functionally speaking, the horizontal pantry is much more organized than my old traditional pantry and I am able to find things much easier now.  Let me show you how I organized my drawers using cardboard boxes.  The boxes were from cereal, protein bars, cracker boxes and store boxes (think Aldi, Costco and Sam's Club boxes).

To some I added Duck Tape to give them a nice finished look, a little more polished, but some I left as is for now.

I didn't want to spend any money so I used Duck Tape I had on hand.

I'll be buying some more Duck Tape probably from Amazon since they seem to have the best deals soon to finish covering my boxes but for now, I'm quite happy with how everything has turned out.

For the box above I started at the top wrapping the Duck Tape around the box with the seams in the back.  I left a little extra above the top of the box to fold over so that it gives the box a nice edge.  I also decided to use a coordinating color at the very bottom to add some flair to the box - also, because I ran out of the patterned Duck Tape. 😉

In all likelihood the boxes will not perfectly fit your drawers but following the directions above it's easy to make them fit perfectly!

You can even use an oddly shaped box - this one was nice and sturdy and lightweight.

After doing a few boxes I was getting frustrated with my scissors.  They were getting sticky and the tape wasn't cutting cleanly through - it was then that I remembered I had a pair of non stick scissors (light bulb moment).  If you don't have a pair of these they are great for crafting.  Things went much more smoothly once I switched to these.

I stored my cupcake items in one box and extracts in another.....

Vitamins in another....

Everything fit nice and neatly into the drawers.

I have been using this system for about two months and I don't have any complaints about it.  I prefer it so much more than my previous pantry.

I don't have to pull everything out to get to an item in the back of the cabinet.  Once the drawer is pulled out I can see everything I need easily at a glance.

You can check out Diane's Post - Chaotic Kitchen Cabinets? Easy Terrific Organizer Ideas to Make and Jennifer's Post - Coffee Cocoa Station and remember to share your creativity in the linky below!