Getting organized: The chaos of cans in the cupboard

This is the first in a weekly series of tips and inspiration for your home and family that we'll post each Wednesday.

Getting and keeping your home organized can be challenging at first...but we're here to help you with quick, easy and affordable ways to tame the clutter and make life a little easier for you and your family.

Your home can be both a calm sanctuary and a hub of activity when you put that old adage to the test:  a place for everything, and everything in its place. Keeping things organized in your home can save you time and money, reduce your daily stress, and give you a sense of calm even when you're busy.

I used to think that organizing every little thing was either a waste of time or just way too anal-retentive.  I've never personally reached "hoarder" status, but I have learned that having too much stuff in too many places was a significant trigger for anxiety and stress. It has a cumulative effect...you don't notice it at first. Not being able to find what you need, buying more of what you forgot you already have, staring at so much stuff on any given surface or in any given cabinet...it just becomes your new normal.

I started realizing just how stressed and annoyed I was, just how out of balance I was, and just how overwhelming it felt when things were not in order. I needed some zen anywhere I could find it, even in someplace as mundane as my kitchen pantry.

So that's where we begin. I have a small kitchen with a tiny pantry cupboard that I like to keep as full as possible so when I want to avoid grocery shopping for a while, I can. But it was always messy in there, and hard to tell what I had versus what I need, and hard to find just the right snack when I was feeling peckish.

Ahhh...doesn't the right side look so much better than the left side? It only took me about 20 minutes to make this transformation...all I needed to do was raise the top shelf one notch to make better use of the vertical space with two sets of adjustable tri-level risers from Bed, Bath & Beyond (I had a coupon burning a hole in my pocket!).

I put all the snacky foods on the bottom shelf and gathered all the individual snack bars and such into a large plastic container. Everything else is grouped together on the other two shelves...all the soups on the right, all the pasta with the sauces, etc. The only things I took out were the oil and vinegar bottles - I found a nicer home for them on a shelf above the stove.

Now I can see exactly everything I have at a glance, which makes meal planning and grocery shopping go so much faster...no more guesswork, and no more digging in the back to figure out what that mystery can is.