Getting Organized

We've watched several episodes of The Preppers Show on the National Geographic Channel.  While I don't agree with lots of the Doomsday scenarios, one thing I noticed was these folks are incredibly organized.  They know where everything is, and when they buy more of an item ~ it appears they group it with the rest of that same item.  Its also funny to hear the "experts" opinion on how prepped they are and whether or not the folks follow their advice.

But, onto my house ~ we do like to be prepared for storms.  Here in Miss. is could be tornadoes or a hurricane.  After Katrina ~ the local stores did lack for certain items because these things were rerouted to the hardest hit areas.  Some of the items rerouted were cleaning supplies, powdered/canned milk, soft drinks, paper products, batteries, flashlights, generators, gas cans, etc.  So having a supply of some of these items would get us through during a natural disaster.

My spice cabinet was somewhat organized but I was still having to go through and move each jar to find what I wanted/needed for a recipe.  Greg ordered me a little spice shelf that fits in the cabinet.  It has little stair step shelves so I can see what I have and where it is. 

before

after

Its looks to be lots easier to see everything.  We do most of our cooking from scratch and make our own seasonings for different dishes, so we had lots of spices.  I also make our taco seasonings and season salt and Greg makes most of his barbeque meat rubs for grilling. I've got some little spice containers from Tupperware that I'm waiting for new lids on.  Then I can go through and repackage some of these.  We buy our garlic, chili powder, onion powder, oregano, basil, and granulated garlic in the big containers from Sams.

After I organized this cabinet...it sort of filtered over into my shelving system in the laundry room.  I had 2 containers of pepper in the cabinet and I took one to the laundry room.  There were some spices on a shelf and I started looking through them and found more pepper.  If there is a pepper shortage in Miss. I am safe ~~~~~

Well, you just can't clean one shelf so I finished the job plus the cabinet above it.  All my mexican food is together : taco shells, salsa, cheese for cheese dip.  All the extra baking supplies are together : sprinkles, cake mix, icing, chocolate chips, baking soda, brown sugar.  All the pickles and relish that we make every year are on a shelf (Katie, I've only got 1 jar of dills left, we need to do that this summer).  All the canning rings, lids, cheese cloth, pickling salt, and pectin are in one spot.  I stocked up on my vanilla extract supply in Honduras this year and I won't need any for quite a while.  I sorted the jelly we made and put like kinds together to see what we needed to make this year ~ we've got plenty of peach and grape but only 1 apple and a couple of strawberry.

I got rid of some expired stuff.  I dumped some peas we had canned and didn't turn out well.  I changed the location of some items.  Combined some packages. And just tidied up.  Next, we've got to tackle sorting all the empty canning jars so I can see what we need to buy and what size we have enough of ~ but thats a task for another day.

So now its time to make a list of what we need to get "just in case".  This is a great time to watch for sales and combine the sales with coupons.  I'll have to remember not to get overcome and buy pepper...but I do need some more salt!

Happy Organizing!

I am linking up with Heidi at http://mysimplecountryliving.blogspot.com/2012/02/country-homemaker-hop-week-8.html.