These corner cupboard organizers are in so many homes and they seem like such a brilliant use of space, but they usually just end up as dumping grounds for every extra pantry item in most homes that have them. It’s the place where canned goods go when they have no other place to live, never to be seen again. Of course, you can turn the organizer all the way around so it seems like you should be able to see and access everything quite easily, but it never fails that things go missing or get forgotten about in there, causing guilt and wasted food in many a happy household with an otherwise fairly organized kitchen. I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and when I started noticing that my own corner cupboard was starting to get quite the collection of old, unused food items, I thought it was time to figure this thing out once and for all. After years of research and practice I bring you today’s post!
So here’s the corner cupboard in my kitchen.
It’s so easy to navigate now that it’s almost hard to believe that it once seemed like an endless pit of soups and random canned veggies that no one wanted.
So let me share with you the basic concept of how you can make this thing make sense for you and then I’ll give you a little tour around. 🙂
Think about how you would organize pantry items on a regular, straight shelf. You would have a space for each item along the front of each shelf and then if you had any duplicate items, you would place those in a row behind that same item. So this works exactly the same way, only circular!
Treat the outer edge of the circle as the front of the shelf, that way as you turn the lazy-susan around, you can see everything that you’ve got, with no mystery items getting stuck somewhere in no-man’s-land in the middle.
You can then stick any duplicate items in a row behind that same item, heading back towards the center of the circle. Sometimes two rows of the same item will need to become one in a triangular shape to accommodate the circularness, but you’ll figure it out. You’re a smart cookie. 🙂
You can have one or two other items that you keep only in the middle of the circle, but make sure it’s stuff that you always like to have on hand so you know exactly what it is. Also keeping the number of things there low means you can still see everything.
Here’s a little diagram of the basic concept from an overhead view.
Bam! Doesn’t life make just a little more sense now that you’ve got this circle cupboard thingy figured out?
Here’s how mine looks in action!
First the top shelf!
And now the bottom shelf!
Chris went through a peanut phase recently and now he’s over it and we’re left with all these extra peanuts. Guess I’d better find some good peanut recipes! I’m open to suggestions!
Kennedy really loves to have this white cheddar macaroni and cheese for lunch on weekends. Like, she really, really likes it, clearly. 🙂
The things that you keep in your corner cupboard will obviously be different and based on what your family likes, but I find it super handy to have somewhere to store lots of the basic things that we use frequently. No matter what you put in here, the basic organizational concept will stay the same!
So that’s it! Problem solved!
If you’re in the mood for some more kitchen organization, I recently did a post about some of my favorite kitchen organization and storage helpers too!
Hope this little tip comes in handy!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.