My house is emptying of furniture, and in the last two days, all of my shelving that comprises my bulk storage system has been purchased. As most of you know if you’ve been reading for a while, I try to buy as much as possible in bulk for the convenience and economy factors. I’ve described how I store foods in square 40 lb buckets or round 50 lb buckets, but the question remains for people how do I store all of those buckets!
So before I move on and totally forget to share about this :), here’s what I’ve done. My system has evolved with time – I began by stacking buckets about three high on a pallet in my laundry room, but as I had more and more foods I was buying in bulk, I didn’t have room. I was delighted when I found these extremely heavy duty shelving units for sale – 6 feet high by 4 feet wide, and 18″ deep. They allowed me to put two rows of buckets on each shelf, which could manage this kind of weight since each shelf has a capacity of 350 pounds.
I had two of these heavy duty shelves in addition to two smaller heavy duty shelves, and then a small storage room lined with metal shelving units (good but not anywhere as close to as strong) where I stored the hundreds of canning jars I had.
Well, the canning jars are just about all sold, and most of the bulk food is sold or used up by now, but I thought you’d still appreciate the pictures anyway. 🙂 (I don’t usually take pictures but dd took them so I could post them for sale, and I asked her to take an additional photo of one loaded so I could share it here with you.) Usually it looked neater (ie all labels lined up to the front, same size buckets together, etc), but everything was transferred from one unit to another to take the pictures, so it was messier than usual.
This is a strategy that I don’t know if I’ll be able to pursue once I move to Israel, certainly not to the degree that I’ve done here – for starters, I won’t have a car and since we’ll be living in an apartment, our space will be more limited. But I hope that this is helpful in giving you an idea of how a large amount of food can be stored efficiently in a small amount of space!
Avivah
I love it! It looks so organised. Did you ever have bug problems? was this in your basement? I also store canned foods in my laundry room and have a small pantry so always looking for other places/ ways to store food. I think due to our climate we tend to get more bugs/ants and it is a challenge to stay one step ahead sometimes. Wishing you and your family a safe trip and hatzlacha raba !! I will be checking in to hear updates and hopefully if I come visit my daughter this year, I’ll look you up 🙂