The Not-So-Lazy Susan

Because I don’t have enough to do… I took a day off in February to gather materials for this project and knocked it out in a weekend.

Due to the fact that I have started baking and cooking more, I decided to make my kitchen more efficient in terms of use of space. I have little cupboard space, but I do have a tall, thin pantry — the shelves did not go all the way from the front to the back (it was probably also used for a broom closet).

While looking for ideas on Pinterest, I came across a pantry re-do in which the blogger uses lazy susans to maximize corner space. My thought was, “That’s a great idea, but it’ll never happen in my tiny kitchen”. I took measurements of every cupboard and drawer in my kitchen, and set out for Ikea in search of airtight food containers and ideas. I picked up some great glassware (the “slom” series), and some other things, like some “book dividers” designed to separate books on shelves, but which I used to separate baking sheets and trays.

And then I came across some lazy susans. I took some measurements, and found that they would fit on the shelves in my skinny pantry!

I stopped at Lowe’s later in the day to get some pressboard to fill in the rest of the shelf space (had the nice boy cut it to size for me), and came home to wash the glassware. Then I found that the pressboard wouldn’t fit because the pantry wasn’t square. The next morning I went to the library and checked out a circular saw and safety goggles (because my library is SO COOL like that), came home and voila, I now have front to back shelves.

I had a roll of shelf liner I had previously purchased at Ikea, probably when I moved into this house. I cut what I needed, and even ended up putting some on top of a couple of the lazy susans, as I found that some of extracts and jars slid around a bit when the susan was turned. I busted out the label maker, filled jars, and put everything back into the pantry, and it looks great.

: These are the contents of my pantry and the freshly washed, new glassware on the dining room table.

: This was also an excellent opportunity to weed out those spices from 1998…

: This is the airtight “SLOM” series from IKEA.

: This is the more artistic view of the glassware.

: Unlike Skinny Jeans, Skinny Pantries are NOT all the rage, and are only slightly more functional.

: Continuing with the theme, these Lazy Susans are a TIGHT FIT, but they work!

: Labels are very important in the pantry. You don’t want to mix up all of those white ingredients.

: Plastic labels are recommended.

: The top two shelves, loosely organized according to purpose. Top shelf is smaller amounts of baking ingredients, next shelf down is cooking (oils, dry goods, etc.).

: These are the next 2 shelves down. As you can see I didn’t have much headroom on the upper shelf here, so it became my Spice Carousel. The lower one has the most oft used baking goods in front (Sugar, Salt, and Flour)…

: And behind the Big 3, are the less used baking ingredients like Oats and Cornmeal.

: The lower shelves are taller items, like my airtight OXO spaghetti container (it wouldn’t fit on any other shelf), and the baking sheets and serving trays, separated by bookends from IKEA.

The bonus is that it will make my time in the kitchen much more efficient. Total cost, was about $40 for the glassware, $40 for the lazy susans, and $7 for the pressboard = $87.