Putting My Mouth Where My Money Is

I started working on the pantry and freezer at our vacation home. Because we're not out here all the time, we lose a lot of food to spoilage.

It's also tough to keep track of which essentials we have and what we're missing. I'm debating over whether I should try to keep an inventory list, but it might be kind of tough. We entertain a lot, so we get a lot of unusual leftovers. So, maybe I'll just stick to inventorying condiments and freezer items. When you shop in bulk, it's easy to overbuy condiments which have a relatively limited shelf life, and freezer items occupy premium space.

Somehow after organizing the freezer, I ended up with less space than when I started even though I threw out a handful of freezer burned items. I guess I shouldn't be surprised though as we had it packed to the gills in a disorganized mess. Fish on the same shelf as fries, fruit and cheese - what? Putting away stuff in our freezer was like a Tetris game - whatever way it fit in there is the way it went in. If I didn't know exactly what I had, it'd probably stay there stuffed in the back until it freezer burned away. If your freezer is the same way and you undertake this project, expect to lose some space efficiency at the cost of organization.

I tried to space the shelves apart in a way that would accommodate the amount of food we normally keep of each, but I also know that if I don't start clearing out extra space with my mouth, I'm going to open the freezer one day and find someone packed in ice cream with the chicken breasts again because it's the only way it fit. Next thing you know, I'll be going through this whole exercise again six months from now and throwing out more freezer burned money.

Hopefully, my labeling all the shelves also prevents things from getting out of hand again. It was kind of hard to zoom in on the labels in the pantry pic, so I scribbled them in.

The pantry was another story. We had some really old cans of food, but there wasn't much else to throw out. There's a lot more space here, so the problem was mostly just getting things organized to keep ourselves from overbuying the same stuff.

Here, the spices and condiments are the things I'm definitely going to inventory list. A lot of condiments require refrigeration after opening, and I happen to know there are 3 open bottles of ketchup in the fridge right now (granted, one of them I just inherited from some Airbnb guests). Also, spices never really go bad, so it's frustrating to waste money buying duplicates of something you'll have a hard time ever using.

I should have taken some before pictures of both, but I sort of just dove right in and thought about it afterwards. I still have to do the fridge, which actually isn't all that bad.