Spring Cleaning with Thrifty 101......The Chest Freezer

 

This week's cleaning was fairly simply.  I have a chest freezer outside in our garage that needed to be thawed out a little.  I didn't want to go as far as thawing it out completely and wiping it down, I just wanted to get the ice build up off the side and organize it a little better. (ha ha....it was organized under all the food that got tossed on top)

Here are the before photos:

Here you can see the ice was so thick on the one edge it had the indent of the lid in it.  I'm sure this was making the seal loose and causing more ice to form.

I realized this needed to happen ASAP when I tried to get a can of juice out the other day and it left an indent in the ice wall.  I had to pry it out of it's place to take it in the house.

This "de icing" process was easy.

• I unplugged the freezer, unloaded some of the meat into a cooler I had on hand.  
• Then I went to town on the "glacier" with a flat head screwdriver and a hammer.  I chiseled away at the ice throwing the large chunks into my driveway.  
• I also used a hair dryer to melt the ice.
• I threw out extra packaging (boxes and grocery bags) and only 2 packages of lunch meat and a popsicle that lost it's home and was so covered in frost I couldn't tell what color is was. (okay, it wasn't that bad....it was green)
• I took food that needed to be used into the house.  I currently have about 12 pounds of ground hamburger in my fridge. :)  I'm envisioning a future post on "eating from your freezer"....stay tuned... :)

I organized the remaining food and here are the after photos:

Order amongst Chaos.

Ahhhhh.  Ice Free. ☺

*Just a reminder about DIY Thrifty Thursday this week!  Hope you come link up and find some inspiration!