Food Organization

One of my big goals for this summer is to get organized. When we moved in quite a few things got put "close" to where they should go but not where I really wanted them. One of the places this was most evident is in our food storage. We had quite a bit of food storage that we moved with us, and have worked on stocking up even more since then. Our goal is to eventually have enough food to last us for one year should something happen. Anyway, my food storage room was a mess, the lovely person who put it away (*cough* E *cough*), decided the best way to organize it was by the way it came out of the box. They didn't consider the fact that it might be nice to put the tuna by the canned salmon, the tomato soup by the spaghetti sauce, and the pears by the peaches. Instead I had a big mess where nothing had enough space and it was making my life, both in cooking and in increasing our stored food amount, a disaster. 

Thankfully I had two awesome helpers to get this mess under control this week. B and C were awesome at sorting the food (since it had gotten to the point we just left bags on the floor because there wasn't enough space). They recognized lots of the food since most of it is stuff that we eat regularly and those things that they didn't we will get to work on learning about. They had lots of fun pretending to fly while they helped me. We did run into two small problems, first being a live bug that C found and picked up (EWWW!) and the second being a leaking can of grape juice that made us spend a little extra clean up time. Other than that we had lots of fun and things look a lot better. I'm so thrilled with the way our storage room now looks and there is space on the self for a one year, or close to, supply of all the canned goods. 

There are so many important reasons to have a supply of food in your house. You can read more about why we do it at the Provident Living website. Although I do believe in all these reasons why we should be storing food my favorite reason is simply because it makes my life easier. Because I keep the food we use in stock I don't have to make emergency trips to the store (or at least not very often) and I know that if I'm sick or something else happens I will be able to feed my family which makes things less stressful all the way around.

Here are a few pictures of what my storage room looks like now. I still need to get our buckets put under the cereal shelf but other than that it is ready and I love having my storage room in a functioning condition!