Spring Cleaning with Thrifty 101...........The food storage room

So it's Monday again, time for another edition of "Spring Cleaning with Thrifty 101"!  I'm so glad I started this segment a few weeks ago.  The weather here is starting to warm up, we were in the 50's today!.....those of you South of SLC and in warmer temps....I don't want to hear about it.☺ HA HA  Warmer temps make me want to be outside, not inside endlessly cleaning.  So by getting head start now, I can enjoy the weather....once it arrives. :)

So the challenge this week was my food storage room.  I realize I am very lucky to have a whole room devoted to "food storage".  We have some HUGE shelves set up in an unfinished room in our basement and I try to keep our essentials in stock.  Cereal, pasta, cake mixes (yes cake mixes are ESSENTIAL in my family ☺), toothpaste, crackers, tissues.....etc.

One of the benefits of using coupons and getting multiple coupons is that you can stock up on your food storage.  If you have 1 coupon to stack on a deal to get 1 package of cereal for .50....if you have 5 coupons you can get 5 boxes at that price.  Eventually you have excess items that you can go downstairs and "shop" in your own store when you are out of spaghetti sauce at 7:00 pm. Or when there is nothing but crumbs left in the cereal box when you try to eat breakfast.

Just like when you get home from vacation, when you come home from the grocery store.....no one wants to unpack.  So this is what my food room looked like before:

 Christmas Decor box that needs to be put in the rafters of the garage, but hasn't made it there yet...

 "Food Glorious Food..."

 Our latest purchases from Smiths.....or maybe it was a few purchases ago....

Once again I was AMAZED at how many mostly empty boxes I had.  By simply consolidating and removing the excess packaging and boxes the room started to open up instantly.

Here are the after photos:

 Christmas box made it to the garage....AND even made it into the rafters. :)

 Organization and once again, my Label Maker to the rescue!

 My canned Tomato Juice from THIS post earlier this year is on the top shelf.

 We replaced one of our dressers with a nicer one we found on clearance.  Since dressers are VERY hard to find ,for the right price, I wanted to keep our old one.  So I turned it into a food storage unit. I use it for paper products tissues, tinfoil, plastic wrap.. and the top 2 drawers are candy. Halloween M&M's, Christmas Hershey Kisses and other candy we found on clearance.  I didn't mark them with labels because I have 3 boys, 2 of which can read. ;)

 Label maker again.

 YES, THIS ROOM DOES HAVE A FLOOR!!!

 I TOOK 2 PHOTOS TO PROVE IT!!

And now time for the Side by side:




I had organized this room a few months ago, so this project took less time then I expected it would.  Like I stated above, it was mostly plastic grocery bags, empty cases and boxes.  Once I "unpacked" things started opening up instantly.  A few trips to the recycle bin and one trip to the garage and I was done!

I just checked the weather, we have 3 days in the mid 50's this week so I'm headed outside for my next project...our garage.  So stay tuned for that.

If you decide to join me in Spring Cleaning grab my new button from the right margin and send me some pics and I'll post them up here!  If you don't want to send pics, stop by and  tell us you are participating in our Spring Cleaning event. :)