Food storage has now become a significant problem. How do we keep track of what we have? How do we use things up before their expiration dates? How do I even know what I have to cook with? How do I get to it when I need it? The answers to these questions were all moving into the Annoying Range on the Exasperation Dial.
Aside from some limited counter space and a small closet-sized and -shaped pantry in the kitchen, we have no room to store extra food unless we put it in the laundry room. The laundry room is, of course, where the washer, dryer, and water heater live, taking up half of the floor and wall space. The room connects the kitchen to the garage and serves as a major passage way for the house. It gets limited cooling from the kitchen (when that door is open) and serious heat from the garage (when that door is open)--and the reverse happens in the winter, when the garage is cold and the house is somewhat less so. (I haven't come up with a solution for temperature control, but it's on my mind.)
That leaves some built-in shelves over the washer and dryer and two free standing shelving units on the remaining walls for storage. The laundry room has doubled as a mud room for many years, but those days are going fast as we try to find more (accessible) space for food. Shelves that used to have "outside shoes" and gardening supplies are getting cleared out and refilled with bottles of water and other beverages. Even shelves that held mass quantities of TP and paper towels are getting new loads of chili and canned tomatoes.
One major problem has been how to stack the cans so that shelf use is maximized and still keep the cans from falling all over the place when a shelf is jostled. Right now, my solution is four-sided cardboard boxes, open at the top and the front. These allow me to stack cans three levels high and to maintain stability on the sides. The open top accommodates uneven can heights.
I have been getting the boxes at stores where I shop, especially at Sam's Club. Whenever I see a display box that looks like it will work on my shelves, I just add it to my cart. This keeps it out of the landfill and saves me from having to buy or make something that does the job.
Some boxes are better than others for "the job." The Mrs. Butterworth's syrup box was already closed on the bottom and three sides and worked very nicely for stacking cans of beans.
The display box for Bakers & Chefs brown sugar needed to be cut down a bit in front to give more view of the soups that I stacked in there, and the cardboard was much thicker than the other boxes, making some cans wobble on the folded edges.
Crest's toothpaste display box was perhaps the best designed for my purposes, but it was a tad shallow for the shelving unit that I needed to use it on. It was also shorter than the other boxes and would not have been as stable for No. 10 cans stacked 3 high.
I still need to accumulate more boxes for this project, but I can already tell that we have more than enough beans and soups stored. I hadn't realized this before, so we just kept buying more. I can also now see that I wasn't just imagining a canned tomato shortage in my kitchen. Apparently I can't buy enough of those! I also took this opportunity to make sure that there were no cans with an '08 expiration date lurking about on the back of a shelf where it could get overlooked until 2011.
Pretty, it's not. Still, it works, and that's what matters. I didn't retire to spend all my time digging through cans to find what I need.
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