Organizing My Food Storage

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Today I'm going to show you how I organize my food storage.

Our church encourages us to be prepared and have a basic supply of food, water and money in savings.  You can read more about that HERE.  Today I'll show you how I organized my food storage.  We are still working on it, and try to stock up on items we use often.  We buy it when it's on sale or in bulk.  Usually we come home from the grocery store and just pile up the cans and boxes in the basement, thinking we'll get around to organizing it later.  Well, this is what it was looking like before I organized it:

Organizing my food storage always seemed like a daunting task.   First off it is down in the basement which is cold and ugly.  Second, it just seems overwhelming, all those cans that just get dumped down there after a grocery trip, sometimes left in grocery store bags.  The cans and boxes are not put in with the oldest in the front.  Well, I finally got the motivation to do something about it and here is what it looks like now:

I did all this in about an hour while the Babes was taking her nap.

The first thing I did was to organize the food by type, putting all the same kind of food together.  I put lighter weight stuff on the top shelves and the heaviest things on the bottom.  I also put the cans in order with the older ones in front and on the left.  Sad to say, I did have to throw out some things.  We had some chili beans that expired in 2004!  And several things were close to expiring, or did expire (that date is only a guideline in most cases, right?) so I brought them upstairs so we'd be sure to use them first.  Now I have lots of room to buy more stuff and we can actually see what we have.  In case you're wondering why some of the cans are upside down, it's so we can read the expiration date on them.

 I store my big mixer down here too since it takes up a lot of room in the kitchen and we don't use it that often.

 Plenty of room to stock up on more cans.  We have lots of soup, but are short on veggies.

I have 5 gallon buckets to hold wheat, flour and oats.  We go through lots of oats and buy them in bulk.  A 50 pound bag lasts up about a year.  The kids love oatmeal for breakfast, every morning.  I also have our 72 hour kit in a grey tote.  We were out of power for three days last fall and it really came in handy.  I just have to remember to replenish what we used.

The next step is to organize my kitchen pantry.  I'll probably have to replace what is in the kitchen pantry with stuff from the basement to make sure I'm using the oldest food first. 

It feels good to finally get this mess under control.
So, how do you keep your food storage organized?

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