After hours and hours of work, plus a back ache and a lot of dirty grime on my clothes, the food storage part of our storage room is now ORGANIZED!!! You can walk in and not trip or get scared or feel depressed. I’m not sure why I waited so long to get this done, but I do need to say thank you for making me do this! If I hadn’t had the motivation from you all, that room would still be messy. There’s a little something to this “tell your blog readers what you need to do” that holds you accountable to getting something done. :)

Here’s one more look at the mess, just so that the pictures to follow make you say a louder “ooooohhh…..ahhhh…”

And nowwwwwww………

Everyone together now, “Ooohhh…Ahhhhh….”

Here’s a different angle of that area, so that you can see that the ugly refrigerator looks even worse now that it’s in a clean room. And also so that you can see my two big blue Rubbermaid tubs which I am using to store cereal, corn chips, raisins, whole wheat pasta and a few other random dried foods that don’t fit well in other containers.

If you look real close at the wooden shelves, you’ll see that they are incredibly crooked. So, don’t look too close.  Those were a project the boys and I tackled a few years ago when Matt was out of town and I desperately wanted shelves. They are pretty much pitiful, but they work. And they remind me of the day when my boys were all little and I was trying to have them help me with this manly project, allthewhile working to keep the babies from eating nails. Ah, the good ol’ days.

My big (free) buckets fit nicely between the shelves. Most of those are filled with my year’s supply of wheat, but some of them contain a huge amount of Sea Salt, or Millet. If you haven’t read about how I acquire free or almost free buckets with lids, hasten to click here and read. (That may be the first time I’ve ever used the word “hasten” on my blog. Or ever.)

Here are some specifics of what is on each shelf because I’m sure you want to know about every square inch of my storage room. (In that case I will hasten to tell you.)  In a lovely see-through Rubbermaid container, I put all my nuts that just came in from Braga Farm. I believe there are a few packs of dried fruit in there too. I went to a lot of trouble to scribble the word “Nuts” on a label, even though you can see right through the container because shucks, labels are cute.

Under the nuts are my buckets of palm shortening, expeller pressed coconut oil and shredded coconut from Tropical Traditions. The buckets under those buckets are actually not what they say they are. I have my bulk cocoa and I can’t remember what else in those buckets…but it’s okay that I can’t remember…I have labels on the top for those too.

Then on the bottom shelf I have some boxes of Natural Value plastic wrap and baggies. I bought a case of each of those about five years ago, I kid you not. That’s what I still have left. I guess now you know how quickly we go through plastic wrap and baggies.

Moving over to the corner shelves that I swiped from my kids’ lego room (without asking)…

Top shelf is tomato paste, organic ketchup, coconut chips, Larabars and tuna. It’s a random assortment, but it works. The next shelf is my bulk popcorn and some rye grain. The next shelf is my bulk Sucanat divided into containers, some oats and my new maple syrup. The bottom shelf is my Ecover dish washing liquid and Ecover dishwasher powder. LOVE that stuff.

To the left of that shelf is one of the pitiful shelves. On top is all the excess canned tomato sauce and applesauce that won’t fit into my pantry in the kitchen. Under that is coconut oil and my mom’s salsa. I’ve had it on my list to tell you the story of my mom’s salsa and I’ve just GOT to get around to doing that. It’s such a wonderful story {sniff}.

The bottom two shelves are random spices and citric acid for making cheese. The spices are not for making cheese, just the citric acid…just in case that wasn’t clear, because spices in cheese, yuck.

Moving over to the pegboard wall and the shelf with jars…JOY! I took your advice and put all my canning rings on the wall. If that wasn’t fun, I don’t know what was. And there on the shelf are some of my empty canning jars waiting for harvest time in the fall.

Oh look, a different view of this area. There are more coconut products from Tropical Traditions. I think we are all aware that I love Tropical Traditions. In a basket on top of the coconut products are some boxes of unbleached muffin liners. Not sure why they ended up there, but I liked propping the basket like that.

And now the other side of the room. Again, let’s see the before picture, shall we?

Yikes, and now the after picture:

It’s much better, but not as impressive perhaps as the other side. I was at least able to clean out and organize my storage containers, as well as put together a shelf of containers I use for taking meals to others. Our window air conditioner is on the floor back there and will stay there until July. And that table right there in front needs to be dusted. Eh, I’ll get to it eventually.

Shew, so there you go. I am not so much in a state of chaos anymore, thankyouverymuch.  Unless you count some of the other areas of our home that kind of fell apart while I was cleaning the storage room this week.

Total money spent on this project:  $0. I had everything I needed on hand for this, including pitiful, crooked shelves and plenty of rubbermaid tubs.

And can I get three cheers for my beautiful red carpet? Yes, I’m sure you’ve been admiring that. And if you’ve been wondering if I’m going to vacuum in there, I’m gonna have say…um no. It’s a storage room and it is overall just a nasty room. I’ll save my housecleaning efforts for the rooms that matter.

Okay, so what have you been working on this week? Show us what you’ve done or share about it in the comments!