Tips For Organizing Your Kitchen and Pantry When You’re Stuck At Home

This is the last post in Ria’s series for The Skinny Confidential and this one is all about your kitchen and pantry organization ideas. She has shared amazing tips and tricks to help you organize everything from how to get started in your home, your morning smoothie/coffee station and grocery lists, to your skin care, to your random cabinets.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ria and her company RiOrganize, she is a superstar organizer. She has organized a ton of famous people’s homes ( including Chrissy Teigen ) and is just such a master of her craft.

You should also know that Ria is coming on The HIM & HER podcast soon to spill all her secrets in one spot, so stay tuned for that.

In this post you’ll learn what Ria thought about my pantry when she first saw it ( hello crusty old croissants ), how to use sentimental items that you don’t want to throw away but don’t know how to use, and her favorite pantry items food storage products.

With that, let’s welcome back Ria for her last installment on The Skinny Confidential.

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Tips For Organizing Your Kitchen and Pantry

♡ Set the scene & tell the audience what it was like when we first met.

Ria Safford: I knocked on the door & you answered…in sweats, wearing a sheet mask, on a call. You were multitasking like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It was actually really inspiring. But it’s important to mention that NOT ONCE did you make me or my team feel neglected. You were fully into purging, but at the same time organizing a shoot with your assistant, editing contracts, & taking calls.

It was awesome to see. I want everyone to know that Lauryn is exactly who you think & hope she would be from consuming her content & talking to her. She works her freaking ass off, & I saw that first hand. 

♡ What were your thoughts when you first saw my pantry?

RS: My initial thought when I saw it was that there was no system. That’s a very common thing we see with all of our clients. When there isn’t much of a rhyme or reason to things & how they’re stored, things can look disorganized. Our goal was to evaluate  your inventory, store dry goods, put items in decanted dry glass jars for easy access, combine it with essential routines & create a space that would be epic for your home.  

♡ Were you impressed with how much stuff I purged?

RS: Yes! Definitely. More often than not we have clients who have a hard time letting go of anything. It’s so nice & refreshing for us when our clients fully embrace the process. Working with you was so funny- I remember finding an old bag of croissants & it made you laugh because you had no idea how long they’d been there or where they came from. We went through some snacks you wanted to try, thought you’d be into, but weren’t- so it’s good to make room for the things that you like. 

♡ What were some things we did to customize our pantry?

RS: After the purge & going through the items, it was really easy to see what mattered to you and what was important to keep and easily accessible. We also talked about customizing the labels to be very ‘you.’ For instance, on the container of boxes of Annie’s Mac & Cheese we wrote DRUNK MAC & CHEESE. So stuff like that was really fun, & we even made the font ‘skinny’ ( thin ) to play on The Skinny Confidential brand. 

We also discussed your favorite breakfast items, one of which was Smart Bran. So we put that kind of stuff at the front of your pantry shelves in canisters so they were easy to grab. For a badass female entrepreneur like you, getting breakfast in the morning shouldn’t slow you down. 

♡ What are some storage products we used in my pantry?

RS: Decanting food was a big part of the pantry project. A big go-to pantry organizing was a variety of sizes of the OXO canister because it was important for us to take your frequently used items & make them visible so you know when to restock.  

We also used an expandable tiered shelf for your sauces & spreads & another one for other favorite products. A turntable is also really good for high shelves or deep shelves because it allows you to quickly get to space that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.  

♡ What was one thing in my kitchen that you wanted me to get rid of but I wouldn’t?

RS: Your pink popcorn machine! I asked when you used it last & you couldn’t remember, but you wouldn’t get rid of it because you said, “But Ria, I WANT to use it.” You won and I let you keep it. To give you credit, I saw on your Instagram Story recently that you did in fact use it. Go you!

♡ You did something really special for me that brought tears to my eyes. Tell us about that. 

RS: You had some of your mom’s placemats and bowls & you just didn’t know what to do with them. They were tucked low in a cabinet where they couldn’t be seen. Those are sentimental things that shouldn’t be thrown away. We decided to surprise you by displaying them on the top shelf of a cabinet in your kitchen where you could have that sweet reminder regularly.

A lot of the time people need to hold on to things for sentimental reasons, but don’t really know how to give them a purposeful use or display them in their home. Sometimes the only reason you need to display something is that it’s going to make you happy. 

Once we purged everything you didn’t really have that much stuff so it was nice to have some fun with the space & displaying things.  

♡ What other ways in the house were we able to display items of my mom’s?

RS: You had your mom’s jewelry among the rest, so we added some stackable jewelry trays in your bathroom drawer. We put them on the top so that you can be reminded of her every time you open the drawer. 

♡ Is your job as an organizer what you thought it would be?

RS: As a professional organizer, it is absolutely never lost on me how lucky I am to have the trust of our clients in their storage solutions. What we do is extremely personal. We are in every pull out drawer, open shelving, pantry door, looking behind every door and under every sink. So unless you’re super on top of your shit, we’re gonna see everything. Even the stuff you didn’t want us to!

Whether something makes you happy, sad or embarrassed, we’re there on this journey with you. Sometimes it’s not so serious & we just go through expired food items. But sometimes it’s going through a deceased parent’s things, or getting rid of things from an ex & it can be very emotional.

Stuff can mean more than ‘the stuff’ & we know how stressful and overwhelming this process can be. Clients are literally stripping themselves & being very vulnerable. We are so grateful people allow us to help them through the process and help them create systems to make their lives easier.

In saying that, it was really cool to go behind the curtain with you, & help streamline your routines so you can put your best TSC-self forward. 

♡ Where can everyone find you? 

RS: Instagram @riorganize |Our website at www.riorganize.com

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There you have it. All the tips and tricks you could ever need straight from a pro. Like I said above, if you haven’t checked out Ria’s other posts, here they are:

♡ How to start organizing your home.

♡ How to set up a smoothie/coffee/tea/morning station.

♡ Skin care 101: Organize the fuck out of your bathroom.

♡ How to organize random cabinets.

Hope you loved these posts and it gave you some inspo to get your own house in order. There’s nothing better than a streamlined smoothie station, divided AM & PM skin care, and organized pantry.

x, lauryn

+ check out my makeup organization here.

++ tips for how to pimp out your bathroom on a budget.

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