Diana Rene 0:06
You're listening to the Declutter and Mom podcast, a podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom.
I'm your host, Diana Rene. And in 2017, I had my second daughter, and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home.
Okay, not literally, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me.

Over the next 10 months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings, and I have never looked back.
I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system, and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks, and encouragement.
Let's listen to today's show.

Katie 0:50
Hi, my name is Katie from Michigan, and my question is: without a pantry, how do I store the bulk grocery items and paper supplies that I buy from Costco? Often they end up on the counter or shoved in a corner of the kitchen and make the whole space just look cluttered and visually stressful. What can I do?

Diana Rene 1:09
Hey Katie, I love this question and I think that it is something that a lot of people can relate to because we want to be able to buy in bulk, uh, especially if you have a if you have kids, if you have kids at all, but especially if you have a large family, and I'm not totally sure um what your specific situation is, but having extra storage space, whether or not you have a pantry, can be difficult.

And so I really like this question, and I think hopefully this will be helpful.

So what I would recommend doing, number one, is to find an area of your home, or this might be multiple areas of your home, and that's okay if that needs to happen.
Whenever I have questions like this from specific people, I really wish I could like do a FaceTime with you and just walk through your home so I could get an exact feeling for what type of space we're working with.

But since we can't do that, here are some of the things that I would look for as I was looking throughout your home.

So, number one, is there already existing space somewhere within the home, not necessarily in the kitchen, that you would be able to create a little backstock area.
For us, that's a couple different places. We do have a pantry, but it's very small. It actually really irritates me.
It's one of the things that I wish I could change about our home. There's not many, I really do actually really love our home. There's not many things about the space I wish I could change. That is one of them.

Um, I wish that we had a bigger pantry. This house is, I think, somewhere between 34 to 3,600 square feet. Our old house was 1,500 square feet and had like a four times the size pantry. Like it's just small.

So I feel you on that. I at least have a pantry, but I myself have had to figure out where to put extra items that I get at Costco because I do like to stock up a little bit and make sure that I have extra things on hand and also helps me not to go to Costco more often. And that helps me not spend as much money.

So I would first look around the home and see if there's just any areas that you could use as backstock area.

And again, this is probably not gonna be like a huge storage room, right? If you don't have a pantry and you're worried about this, you probably don't have like a huge, unlimited amount of opportunities for storage in your home.

And I get that. So I want you to look for little pockets throughout your home.

Some of the most common places that you can find these pockets are in basements. If you have an accessible attic, I don't know if you do.
It needs to be accessible though. It can't be like something that you have to climb Mount Everest to get into, right?
Like it has to be something that you have to be able to get into pretty easily.

This could be like a coat closet or any other type of like utility or linen closet. It could be even like under beds.

Now, here's the thing: one giant disclaimer. Anytime we are looking to store food in any part of the home, we want to be cognizant of potential rodents or bugs, insects, whatever.

Any like when we bought, I th I'm sure I've taught I know I've talked about this on the podcast before, but when we bought our old house, not the current house that we're in right now, but our old house, we realized the night we moved in, literally night one, my husband and I are sitting on the couch watching TV and see a mouse scurry across the wall.

We realized night one after we already moved everything in that we had a major problem in our house with mice.
And it took a while to get rid of. But that was like an eye-opener for me on how um having food anywhere that rodents can get into, you just want to be very aware of that when you are storing, right?

So again, that wasn't our issue because we had just moved into the house, but it made me learn a lot about how to properly store food.

So, and ever since then, I'm just very aware of it because I never ever want to deal with that ever again. I have nightmares still. I still, I'm not kidding, that sounds very dramatic, but I still sometimes wake up and feel like it, like I have nightmares about it. I think about it and it like gives me the heapie jeebies.

So if you are going to be storing food anywhere, you need to have it in some some type of closed bin situation. You want it to be something that fully closes.
You don't want to put, if it's like cans, that's different, right? Because cans are already like fully enclosed, nothing's getting in there.

But if it's like boxes of food, you want it to be in something that is not um able for thing for rodents or bugs to get into.
So you want it to like snap shut plastic, metal, tin, whatever, but you just want to make sure that it closes.

So, for example, if you were going to store extra food, uh extra Costco snacks under a bed, for example, if you just have really limited space and you have to figure it out, and that's one of the only places in the home that like you have actual space, then I would make sure it was in a bin that slides under the bed and and the top like snapshot.

Does that make sense? Okay, that's my disclaimer.

I just always want to make sure because, like me, like when I moved into that house, I had no idea. I had no idea. We had never dealt with it before, and I had no idea that they are sneaky little things and they can get into just about anything.

The uh pest control guy that we had hired at the old house told me something again that haunted me forever that a mouse can get into something as small as like the tip of a screwdriver. That's insanity.

Anyway, okay, so that's my disclaimer. Make sure that you are properly securing any food that you decide to put anywhere in your home.

Okay. At our old house, we actually did have some food that we wanted to store in um our basement at the time. It was during uh COVID.
And I like really stocked up on like rice and beans and like all of these things because I was really nervous. Like we all were, like we had no idea what was going to happen.
And based on what we were being told, it felt like the grocery stores were gonna shut down for like a year.

So I actually got uh metal trash cans, like metal. Oh gosh, I wish I could show you this, but they were like up to my hip and I'm tall.
Um they were up to my hip and they were metal round trash cans, and they had a metal lid that like securely went on top of it for this exact reason, because we put any food that we were storing down there in these metal clean garbage bins.

They were never used for garbage, and that way we knew that nothing was going to get into that and we could securely and safely store food down there.

So that's just an example.

Okay, so I want you to look for little spaces. That was a much longer disclaimer than I had intended.

So look for smaller spaces, look for um closets, look for basements, look for just look for places that you can either put bins, shelving with smaller bins, things like that, that you can put extra things.

For us right now, we put some backstock in a coat closet.
And mostly in that coat closet, we have backstock of snacks.

Um, so what I mean is like uh pre-packaged individual snacks that my kids can bring to school or soccer practice or whatever.

And so I have two bins in the coat closet that have the extras of that.

And then the second thing, if you um do have a little bit extra space in your home that you're able to add something. So for us in our dining room, I was able to add a row of cabinets.

They are not built-ins, even I wish they were. I would eventually like to do some type of built-in situation, but these were just IKEA cabinets. I believe we have three in a row. I'm thinking in my brain.

Um, we have three in a row, and they are again like maybe hip, maybe a little bit higher height on me, but they are just additional storage.

And so one of those cabinets is all of is all of our drink backstock.

I like to get drinks in bulk at Costco. And so um we'll put like one shelf is mostly like protein drinks, another shelf is soda, another shelf is like juice and Gatorade and things like that.

So I put any extra drinks that we get from the store and put them in that one cabinet.
And then the next cabinet is actually our gluten cabinet.

And so my oldest has celiac, my youngest does not.
Um, and we try to find a good balance of making sure that the home is safe for my oldest and also not making my youngest feel like she is kind of punished for not being able to have gluten at home, you know.

So um we have this gluten cabinet where it has all of her gluten snacks. So it has like her goldfish and her cheez-its and her crackers and all sorts of things.
Um, and so anything that has gluten that's brought into the house goes into this gluten cabinet.

And then the third cabinet is uh canned goods and what else? Pastas. I think that's it, actually.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I think we have put all of our pastas in there, which we have a lot because we eat a lot of pasta, mac and cheese, all those things.

We put pastas in there, and then we put all of our canned goods in that cabinet as well.

So just anything that comes in a can or a jar, we put like marinara in there also, goes in that cabinet.

And so that helps us um to basically, because we have the very small pantry, it helps me to help organize a little bit better on what goes where and know what I have.

Um, and that way when I shop, I know what we have and I am just able to shop better.

But the same principle could be used for backstock.

So if you like to go to Costco and you like to get all the extra things, if you have that extra space that you could put in a cabinet, that's really helpful also.

And there's so many cabinets out there.

I have two, no, I have four tall, really tall cabinets or way, I am almost six feet tall, and these are way taller than me. And I got them from Home Depot several years, so I don't have a link, but they are twice the size of the IKEA cabinets that we have in the dining room, and those are in my my home office, and those don't store any food, but same idea.

Depending on what space you have, you could get a taller one so that you have even more storage.

But those are the things that I would first look at. And then I would also just look around your kitchen and see what can, where can you make space if you can?

Again, I don't, I can't see your kitchen, so I don't know exactly what we're dealing with.

But are there things that we can let go of? Can we declutter in the kitchen? Can we consolidate? Can we put a couple more things into a cabinet that maybe feels a little spread out right now?

That way we can open up some of the cabinet space as a makeshift pantry.

Where can we make more space in the actual kitchen? And how can we better utilize the space that we already have in there, making sure that we're taking advantage of the vertical space inside cabinets?

This is something I see all the time.

Where I will be working with someone in my program and they'll send me a picture of a kitchen cabinet and they say it's full, but the thing is is that they're just utilizing like the bottom half of each shelf, right?

And so there's this like vertical space that's lost, and we can uh use like very inexpensive makeshift shelving that we can put in there and we can double basically the space that we're able to utilize inside that cabinet.

So those are the things that I would look to, and then very last is that we may have to just cut down on our bulk shopping, which is not fun and not what we really want to do because um we like to take advantage of going less times, we like to take advantage of lower prices and all that, and I totally get that.

But if we just don't have the space, then sometimes we do have to scale back a little bit on that, and so that's just my final thought on it.

I hope that is helpful um for everybody listening and for our caller.
And I hope you will join us next week on the Decluttered Mom podcast.

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