Clean & Organized...

Look what I accomplished yesterday! Well, let me back up. For a while I've been suspicious that we may have mice. Then this week, during family scripture reading, Jonathan saw one. Okay, that did it; I had to protect our food storage. A few weeks ago I found a bag of wheat with a hole in it, wheat spilling out. That was my first inkling we may have a mouse problem. But I wasn't sure that was the problem, and I was swamped with other things -- like Christmas?! But I knew we needed to clean, organize and protect the food in our store room. Yesterday was my first day off in the new year that I wasn't putting away Christmas or being sick, so it was the day.

Don't be too disgusted, but here's the before pictures, after a year of kids just dumping the food supplies or Christmas stuff, or whatever--or playing in there!--and where the wheat was spilling.





Here's where I went for supplies; (it's January, so storage supplies are on sale!):




Here's the in between:

I reorganized everything on the shelves too, so that it was more intuitive. Samuel gets sent down to get the supplies needed for fixing dinner, and occasionally he can't find what I need. Now the condiments are in one section, and since we use them the most, the tomatoes are front and center; all like-foods are next to each other. He loves it!

This gave me a SUPER opportunity to evaluate our inventory, and make a list of the basics that we needed. And Macey's (grocery store around here) was having a caselot and food storage sale! I was intending to go shopping that day anyway, so I took my list and replenished my basics. Now those half empty bins are full again, except the flour one, since they were all out of the one I wanted yesterday. I'll go back today or Monday. We have at least 3-6 months worth, and I'll keep working on building it up some more.

Now my store room is the cleanest, most organized room in the house! Hopefully, I can get that to spill over into the rest of the house soon!

Doesn't it look GREAT?:

And SAFER from thieving rodents....TAKE THAT, Mice!



My philosophy about food storage? Only store what you eat and will rotate on an ongoing basis. Last year when eggs got outrageously priced, I tried the dried egg product for all my cooking. I loved it so much, I use that in ALL my baking/cooking, (unless eggs is the main ingredient.) So I bought more of that. If we have to live on food storage, we'll have lots of whole wheat pancakes, biscuit-mix biscuits & waffles - just no french toast. We do eat lots of whole wheat or half and half foods. Our family is too big to use pre-packaged foods very often, so most of our foods are easy recipes mostly from scratch. It's cheap, and I enjoy cooking most of the time, so I don't mind.

BTW, if you want you can go to my recipe website, where I'm keeping my recipes - it's a great way for me to preserve, ready-to-print recipes, and share them (with my mom on her mission, or the neighbor who wants the recipe for what I took them for dinner.) And I can throw away lots of papers that otherwise are taking room in my cupboards!

I love clean spaces...I just wish I were better at keeping things that way!

So which is my next project? I need another one that will stay done for longer than an hour or less!