If you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard the complaint that there’s “nothing to eat” — only to open the pantry yourself and find that it’s actually plenty full. Perhaps the real problem here is that the delicious and nutritious foods your family loves are hidden in the chaos of a disorganized storage space.

You may be holding on to expired foodstuffs, duplicate items, or even gifted products that you’ll never use. If your dry-goods storage is overflowing and you can’t find the cornstarch when you really need it, you are missing out on the joys of a well-ordered space.

The pantry is like a command center, and a thoughtfully designed one can turn your kitchen into a functional space that serves the whole family. “A well-organized pantry makes life easier and saves time and money,” says Danielle Walker, best-selling author of Healthy in a Hurry. “I can quickly grab what I need for my meals, which gives me more time to cook and enjoy my family with less stress. Plus, I’m not wasting food, and I can see what’s running low, so I know when to restock.”

Ideally, your organized pantry will give you a clear view of what you have — including the foods you keep on hand, the ingredients you use most often, and the snacks that you grab to go. This allows you to easily remove and replace items, all while serving the unique needs of your family.

Though it may seem daunting to go from chaos to order, the pantry is actually one of the most straightforward areas of your home to declutter and reorganize.

“I love organizing pantries and kitchens, because it’s the easiest space to purge,” says Naeemah Ford Goldson, an organizing and design expert in Atlanta. “You can start small, organizing for no more than 30 minutes, and make a lot of progress.”

Try these tips to make your pantry work for you.

1) Declutter First

Start by getting rid of the products you don’t need. Pull out all the items in your pantry and toss those whose expiration dates have passed. Anything that hasn’t expired can be donated to a food pantry in your area. Bonus: Doing good for someone else can turn the chore into a positive moment in your day.

If this feels overwhelming, you can ­declutter shelf by shelf or one category at a time. Perhaps one day you pull out all the canned goods to ­decide what to keep and what to donate. Next, sort through pastas and grains. Then, organize your bottles and condiments. The more you streamline the items that you keep on hand, the easier it is to find everything.

2) Consider Your Needs

The next step is to assess the best storage system for the foods your family uses most regularly. Evaluate your space to decide what will fit where, with an eye to ease of access.

A common obstacle at this stage is not quite knowing what to do with the space you have, Walker notes, adding that plenty of people don’t have a true pantry at home. “It might be a cupboard that’s meant for dishes, but you’re using it for food, or maybe it’s a random little coat closet that you’ve transitioned into a pantry.”

Create zones for different categories, such as baking supplies, canned products, spices, oils and vinegars, and grains.

If your pantry is small, make use of vertical space and stackable containers. If the space features plenty of shelving, put like items together and use adjustable shelves to store the items you usually stock. A few roll-out shelves might add versatility, and a door rack can create extra space.

If someone in your ­family has an allergy or special ­dietary needs, that will influence your organizational structure too. Put items for young children lower down, where they can easily grab them — and keep any ­allergens or special-­occasion items out of reach on higher shelves.

3) Make It Yours

Now’s the time to consider how to make the space your own. If you’re a visual person, you might benefit from clear containers for grains, beans, and other dry items. Or perhaps decorative baskets with labels are more your style.

“It can actually be kind of fun, when you feel overwhelmed about it, to look at it as like a little Tetris puzzle,” Walker says. “Get a couple of tools that help make it a little more organized.”

Do you want to get risers to elevate cans and boxes in the back of your pantry so they’re easier to see? Or perhaps you would be better off with a bin that you can pull out and slide back in when you’ve retrieved what you need.

You don’t need to buy lots of new storage products, but you might invest in an item or two that would make a difference for your space. Consider, too, that you may be able to repurpose household items to help corral certain foodstuffs: Laundry baskets, shoe boxes, and old office storage containers can all be useful organizational tools.

Use color if that’s your thing, or monochrome if you prefer. “Whatever you do, whatever theme you decide on, stick with that,” Ford Goldson says, “so there’s not a hodgepodge of different types of organizing products in the pantry.”

Walker stores snacks in a rotating tray with clear drawers so her children can spin around to the foods they want. “It’s like the wheel of snacks,” she says.

Keep baskets of fruit and wholesome snacks front and center in the pantry to encourage healthy eating.

4) Keep it Up

Once you’ve decided on an organizational strategy, create routines to maintain your streamlined pantry. Make sure everyone knows where things go and what to do when items run low — whether that’s adding to a shopping list on the fridge or using a shared grocery app.

Dedicate time to keeping your system maintained. Perhaps every Sunday night is your pantry reset, when you bring home groceries and restock your containers. Dump the existing, older beans or grains into a bowl, decant the new supplies into the bottom of the container, where they’ll be consumed last, and add the older beans and grains to the top.

Similarly, put the newest cans and boxes in the back of your pantry and bring old ones to the front so they can be eaten before they expire.

“Get in the habit of doing it,” says Ford Goldson. “It takes a little bit more time. But once all the groceries are put away, you’re good.”

If you use bins, be sure to adjust labels as you add new items or change their contents. Ford Goldson likes bin clip labels, which are easy to replace as needed. Including expiration dates on the label can help you quickly see which products need to get used up.

Walker’s pantry system also helps her plan out family meals. “Pantry organizing goes hand in hand with meal planning,” she explains. “Having some canned and jarred items available is a nice fallback.” Consider stocking an array of favorite ingredients that you can easily whip up into a meal — a concept Walker calls “back-pocket dinners.”

Another tip: Snap a few photos of your pantry before you go to the grocery store. Then you can easily refer to the photo to check your supply and avoid buying duplicates.

As you live with your newly organized pantry, you may adjust and customize further based on your needs. Just stick to some core principles: good visibility, ease of access, and a system that naturally prompts you to eat older items first and stock newer food where it can be used last.

Above all, remember the organizing mantra: a place for everything, and everything in its place. You may be surprised by how much it changes your life.

“Organizing your pantry can make your life simpler,” Walker says, “and help you maintain your healthy eating habits without the frustration and waste.”

This article originally appeared as “Optimize Your Pantry” in the May/June 2024 issue of Experience Life.

Items in a medicine cabinet (or bathroom drawer or shelf) have a way of proliferating. “We think, well, this is a medicine-y, first aid-y, bathroom-y kind of thing, so I guess I’ll just throw it in the medicine cabinet because I don’t know where else to put it,” says certified organizer and life coach Sara Skillen. Next thing we know, the space is stuffed — and good luck finding the tweezers.

Why Decluttering Matters

Some toiletries, grooming supplies, and medications will be in daily rotation, while others get used only occasionally. A well-organized medicine cabinet will keep them separate, helping to ensure you don’t accidentally take the wrong medication or buy more tubes of hair gel or toothpaste than you need.

How to Declutter

Many items in a medicine cabinet are consumable, so start by weeding out expired items along with those no longer in their prime. Pull out first aid and medical supplies you aren’t currently using and store them together in a separate space.

Next, find duplicates of products and put the spares in an “overstock” container. When you run out of something, shop your overstock stash first. Consolidate half-filled bottles when possible, and if you have just a bit of lotion or soap left in a container, Gerasimo suggests, decant it into a small jar to make it easier to use up.

Finally, wipe down the shelves and arrange the remaining items for convenience. “Keep your daily self-care items [like toothbrush and toothpaste] in the area that’s easiest to reach,” she says. Place more occasional-use things — nail clippers, tweezers, razor — higher up. That way you won’t have to push aside the nail clippers twice a day just to get to your toothbrush.

How to Defend With Beauty

“Let something beautiful hold the mundane,” advises Laura Benko, author of The Holistic Home: Feng Shui for Mind, Body, Spirit, Space. For example, rather than leaving cotton swabs in their plastic clamshell, transfer them to a pretty glass jar. Seeing something a little bit lovely every time you open the medicine cabinet can be surprisingly satisfying.

Bills to pay. Receipts to file. Appointment reminders, report cards, grocery lists. If there’s a vaguely important piece of paper in the house, the home-office desk draws stuff to it with the force of a rip tide. And even with the mostly digital nature of office work, the biggest desk can still feel too small for active paper files and office supplies.

Why Decluttering Matters

The home-office desk serves as a de facto to-do list for our lives, so it feels especially overwhelming when it’s a mess. If we also work from home, that feeling may be compounded. A recent study from DePaul University found office clutter predicts emotional exhaustion and stress.

On the flip side, its centrality means that decluttering the desk can be especially rewarding. “In feng shui, the desk represents your vocational path,” says Laura Benko, author of The Holistic Home: Feng Shui for Mind, Body, Spirit, Space. “From an energetic point of view, you want to give yourself a boost wherever you can.”

How to Declutter

Experts recommend starting with a clean slate. Take everything off your desk for a week and place it nearby. During that week, identify the items you used daily. Anything you didn’t use gets a new home on a nearby shelf or in a drawer.

When you’re choosing what to keep, respect your natural work tendencies. If you’re a paper person, there’s no need to force yourself to go completely digital, says residential organizer Katie Tracy, author of Behind the Closed Door: The Mental Stress of Physical Stuff. Simply create filing systems that reflect the action-oriented nature of your paper.

“When we think about categories of paper, our tendency is to put a noun to them: These are my bills, these are my appointments,” she notes. “Think instead in verbs. What action do I have to take? So, ‘bills’ becomes ‘to pay.’ Messages and follow-up reminders become ‘to call.’ That way, you’re grouping the same types of actions together.”

Another way to cut down on visual clutter: Keep track of to-do items on your calendar instead of posting reminders around your desk. “Sometimes you don’t have time to wrap your head around a complex topic such as home insurance and go down all the paths of inquiry and consideration,” says feng shui and decluttering expert Andrea Gerasimo.

“But you can schedule a time to deal with it later so you can quiet your mind and attend to the things you need to do now.”

As you develop the systems that work best for you, consistency is key. “Once a week, reset,” suggests Tracy. Take a few minutes at the end of each week to put your desk back in order. And if the piles do return, don’t be too hard on yourself. Just clear everything off again and start fresh.

How to Defend With Beauty

Placing a houseplant or a small statue on your desk not only discourages clutter; it gives your eye something pleasant to land on while you’re working, suggests Gerasimo. “This gives your desk visual structure and creates more mental ease.”

The nightstand is the command center of the bedroom: We want everything within arm’s reach after we’re tucked in. While sleep experts recommend using our beds only for sleep and sex, many of us use them for multiple purposes, including reading, working, studying, even eating. “When we treat our bed like a workplace, then it tends to collect more,” says Laura Benko, author of The Holistic Home: Feng Shui for Mind, Body, Spirit, Space.

Why Declutter Your Nightstand?

The bedside table is one of the last things we see before we fall asleep and one of the first things we see when we wake up. That’s one reason it has an outsized impact on how we feel. “We’re highly impressionable to the imagery in our bedroom,” Benko explains. “So be mindful of the messages that surround you while you rest and restore.”

Think of things that usually occupy the nightstand: books you haven’t read yet, maybe the spreadsheet for tomorrow’s meeting. It might be littered with used tissues and other detritus. Benko argues these items are all loaded with symbolism that can interfere with sleep, so clearing this surface can contribute to a better night’s rest.

How to Declutter the Nightstand

A perfectly clear surface isn’t necessarily the goal. For some people, a small stack of books may be more inspirational than stressful. The main objective is simply to relocate any objects you don’t use nightly to a more appropriate location.

The same goes if your bedside table has a drawer — limit what you store there to things you use on a nightly basis, like earplugs, an eye mask, and moisturizer. Clear out any extra power cords, pens, and other random items that may have found their way in. Once this space is decluttered, it can be relatively easy to keep clean. As part of your morning or evening routine, take 30 to 60 seconds to put things away and reset your space.

If miscellany does creep back in, you can create systems to contain it. I told feng shui and decluttering expert Andrea Gerasimo about the two years’ worth of dead AAA batteries from my clip-on book light rolling around in my nightstand drawer. She suggested putting a snack-size Ziploc in the drawer that holds no more than a half dozen depleted batteries at a time; when that’s full, it’s time to recycle them.

How to Defend With Beauty

Benko recommends placing a natural object on your nightstand to discourage clutter and set the energetic stage for restful sleep. “A crystal or a simple flower arrangement will [suggest] a connection to something bigger than you, something that is universally connective.”

Explore the projects:

Bedside Table  ⋅  Home-Office Desk  ⋅  Medicine Cabinet  ⋅  Kitchen Table/Island

Fumbling in the dark, my hand pawed at the box of tissues and the stack of books on my nightstand, traced the base of the lamp and the container of earplugs, mistakenly grasped at the bottle of lotion, then whack: There went the glass of water. Lights on. Towels out. I was up in the middle of the night once again, sopping up a watery mess.

I wish my bedside table were the only cluttered area in my home.

With two work-from-home adults and a homework-afflicted teenager in our house, pretty much every horizontal surface is fair game for books and papers, miscellaneous technology, and bags and backpacks.

Clutter can disorient, distract, and drain us. One UCLA study showed that people who described their homes as cluttered displayed elevated cortisol levels compared with those who did not. Research has also suggested that cluttered spaces tend to be linked with procrastination and mindless snacking, habits that undermine both mental and physical well-being.

In short, our spaces affect us more than we know.

“Every object our eye lands on, even if it’s so fast we’re not conscious of it, has an associated thought or feeling,” explains feng shui and decluttering expert Andrea Gerasimo.

When our eyes perceive clutter and disorganization, we can feel overwhelmed. When we routinely spend time searching for everyday items like phones or keys, it adds to mental fatigue. And when the clutter carries emotional weight, as with memorabilia or eternally unfinished projects, we can feel stuck in place.

“When we don’t feel good mentally, we’re in a poor position to take action,” explains residential organizer Katie Tracy, author of Behind the Closed Door: The Mental Stress of Physical Stuff. “It’s not just that the physical space impacts us mentally. It’s also that our mental space impacts how well we can maintain systems or create change in that space. It’s cyclical.”

Mindset Over Matter

If you’re constantly digging through piles and moving stacks around to get to what you need, your stuff may have more control over you than you have over it.

“Once clutter [starts] impeding you from living a healthy, efficient, and beautiful life — then it’s a problem,” says Laura Benko, author of The Holistic Home: Feng Shui for Mind, Body, Spirit, Space.

There’s no single right way to declutter, but most experts agree that it’s important to start small and let go of the idea that any space will be clutter-free forever. “Think of decluttering as a process, not a project,” advises Tracy.

“The last thing you want to do is decide you’re going to do all of it,” adds Gerasimo, who suggests beginning with a single drawer — or even your wallet. “The gratification of that, even if it’s the only space in the house that’s clear, is powerful.”

In the spirit of starting small, we’ve asked our experts for decluttering guidance in four modest spaces in the home. They showed us how a little decluttering can have a big impact when you focus on the areas you use the most.

4) The Kitchen Table/Island

The kitchen is where we congregate. It’s where we cook meals while kids do homework, where some of us sort the mail and pay the bills, and where the lighting is best for projects, puzzles, and games.

It’s also where we dump our stuff. “When people come home, they’re tired, and they often don’t pause and take the extra steps to put the bags away or sort the mail they just brought in,” says Skillen.

Why decluttering matters: This high-traffic area is used every day, which makes it easy to clutter. Still, we need to keep it clear of things that get in the way of preparing and eating food.

“We call it the shuffle,” says Tracy. “You shuffle stuff from the counter to the table so you can make dinner, and then you move it from the table so you can eat dinner, and it ends up back on the counter.”

Skillen notes that “we’re going to be healthier if we prepare our meals at home and sit down and eat together. If there’s too much stuff on the kitchen table to sit down, everybody’s going to park where it’s easy and most comfortable, often in front of the TV.”

How to declutter: The kitchen table or island is ultimately meant for eating; it isn’t really designed for activities like working, paying bills, or playing games. But that’s how we use it, so rather than trying to relocate these activities, we can create systems to accommodate reality.

For example, if your kids like doing homework at the table, Skillen suggests buying a small caddy or rolling cart where they can stash their books and papers when it’s time to eat. “You can roll it away from the table and it doesn’t have to be a big production,” she says.

If you regularly pay bills or do other paperwork at the kitchen table, set yourself up to do so officially by keeping your checkbook or files in a cabinet or drawer near the table, advises Tracy. You can also create other spaces nearby for incoming stuff — a basket for mail, a bowl for keys, hooks for bags. Keeping the kitchen table decluttered is largely about creating systems to accommodate its many uses.

How to defend with beauty: Gerasimo explains that placing something beautiful — a special bowl, a silver platter, a bouquet — in the center of the table or island creates a sense of structure and discourages the willy-nilly depositing of clutter. “There’s something about a thing of beauty that says, ‘Don’t just come and set all your crap down here!’”

When Marie Kondo published The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, many Americans embraced her simple decluttering principle: If something doesn’t “spark joy,” out it goes. A few years later, Margareta Magnusson published a similar guide with a mildly macabre title: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. We won’t be around forever, Magnusson reminds us, and we owe it to the people who survive us to deal with our stuff so they don’t have to after we’re gone.

Are we looking at a stark contrast between Japanese joy and Nordic-noir morbidity? Not at all, says Caroline Guntur, a.k.a. The Swedish Organizer. The Chicago-based consultant insists there is plenty of joy in what the Swedes call döstädning. While Kondo advises chucking what doesn’t make you happy, death cleaning is more about mindfully passing on what does — and ensuring the stuff you don’t love finds a good home too.

Notably, although death cleaning is framed around an eventuality generally associated with old age, it pays to not procrastinate. For one thing, we don’t know when the curtain will fall on our time. And starting early can help us appreciate the things we really want and need while preventing clutter from overwhelming us.

Success Strategies

Let go of morbid thoughts and regret. Despite its name, death cleaning is all about life. In her book, Magnusson writes that the practice can make your life more pleasant by removing unnecessary things and making your home nice and orderly. “It is about a permanent form of organization that makes your everyday life run more smoothly.”

“It’s not about letting go,” Guntur adds. “It’s about making sure your possessions live on. Though you might feel like, I really love this item, I’m attached to it, when you see the joy of the person who gets to use and appreciate it, that tends to offset that feeling. You’re making conscious decisions about where your items go, not leaving it up to chance. I think that’s very life-affirming.”

Start before the last act of life. Guntur acknowledges that the elderly are more likely than younger people to think about their legacy and downsize, but it can start at almost any adult age — “after all, we really don’t know when the end is going to come, do we?” she says. “For people with children, it might be wise to wait [to share items] until they’re at an age when they can appreciate the value of what you’ll be passing on to them. But it’s never too early to get your affairs in order.”

Start small. The key to any kind of organizing, Guntur says, is to begin with one small goal; tackling something manageable will usually generate momentum. “The idea is just to get the ball moving,” she says, “and then, once it’s in motion, it tends to roll on its own.” (Try one of these small, yet high impact, places to start.)

Tell stories. A big difference between decluttering and death cleaning is that the Swedish practice allows you to take time to appreciate and tell stories about important items, Guntur notes. This can help with the overwhelm.

“What I normally tell people is to choose one thing that’s important to you and that you want to pass on — maybe a family heirloom or a precious photo,” she adds. “Tell the story behind it, so the story doesn’t get lost. The process of sharing, and the appreciation that the recipient feels, can really work against overwhelm and make you say to yourself, That was great! Now, what else can I do?” The positive feelings that come with this process can help bring resistive relatives and friends on board, too.

Take your time with the things that matter most. “Death cleaning is a dance between practicality and emotional well-being, as decluttering always is,” says Guntur. “The amount of emotion and value an item holds should be equivalent to the amount of time you put into finding its new home.”

For example, finding a home for a spare decorative item, like a vase from a department store, may take mere minutes because the item doesn’t hold a lot of meaning beyond its practical use. But finding a new home for something more valuable, like a signed piece of art, will take longer. While you will likely keep those items for more time to enjoy for yourself, you can consider eventually selling it, donating it to a charity auction, or passing it down to someone who will appreciate it.

Create a “Throwaway Box.” Consider filling a small box with personal items you can’t bear to part with, such as old letters, photographs, mementos, and journals, which are valuable to you and no one else. Indicate that the box should be thrown away when you are gone so that no one feels obligated to keep or find a new home for those possessions.

Get help. You don’t need to death-clean alone. Family and friends are natural allies and you can also call on professional organizers. Guntur advises choosing one who understands death cleaning and the emotional, familial, and legacy-oriented aspects of the process — usually someone who has been trained as a personal coach as well. “A lot of organizers are trained to get the job done as fast as possible,” she says. “But you want someone who is going to support you through a process that is slower and full of feelings.”

Look far and wide for recipients. While many items may go to family members and friends, you’re likely to own things that either won’t be meaningful to them or will add unwanted clutter to their home. In those cases, try to remember that the rejection of your item is in no way a rejection of you as a person. “It may feel like a personal rejection, but it’s not,” Guntur notes. “Besides, if the person doesn’t see the value of the object, they’re not the right recipient anyway.”

Meanwhile, a little research can turn up those who will appreciate what you have to share, Guntur says. “A gentleman in one of my workshops said, ‘I have all these old books and photos and nobody in my family is interested.’ What we came up with for him was, ‘How about the local history museum?’ He had amazing photos of how his town used to look, and a museum would love them.”

Selling is your final option to keep your things out of the trash bin. Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and Poshmark, provide a wide pool of possibilities. You may also consider hosting a living estate sale, which can help you liquidate numerous belongings. After all, says Guntur, someone willing to pay for your object probably finds it meaningful.