Metal shelves to maximize food storage space

I recently bought a few metal shelving units from Menards to give me more vertical space for an ever-increasing batch of canned goods, and let me tell you, having sturdy shelves is making a huge difference. The combined weight of myriad cases of canned goods was becoming a worry for my original storage shelves, but these metal units are up to the task and are a huge help for my pantry organization.

The first photo below is of some of the shelves I'd already had set up, and as you can see I've arranged them at right angles to each other to get the maximum amount of shelf space relative to the floor area available for the shelves. As an example, eight shelf units that are four feet long and one foot deep can be set up at right angles in a long row of connected units so that you could fit those eight units in a 5-by-16-foot area--bolt four shelves together side by side (which would span 16 feet in length) and then bolt each of the remaining shelves perpendicular to the left end of the shelves that are parallel to the wall. (The shelves that are parallel to the wall are a foot deep and the shelves that are perpendicular to those shelves are four feet wide, for a total depth of five feet, and the four 4-foot-long shelves are 16 feet long when bolted together.)

In the second photo, hopefully you can see the depth of the storage area to give you an idea of how much you can potentially stock up in what may look like a small area. Shelves are one of your best friends when it comes to creating space for food storage.

I hope this helps you expand your pantry no matter how small it looks!

Breakfast from our food storage

My family has basically two levels of food storage--what we normally eat and have a lot of in our kitchen and extended pantry, and what we normally eat and have EVEN MORE of in what I've heard referred to as our deep larder. And it just makes sense that for your food storage, you should stock up large quantities of what you normally eat anyway, because why would you stock up on stuff you don't eat??

So with that in mind, having plenty of food on hand has paid off this past week while I've still been jobless (but praise the Lord, I start a new job Tuesday!), because even though we've had very little cash to spare the past couple weeks, we haven't had to set foot in a grocery store because we have plenty of food to draw from.

Some people might think "food storage" sounds boring and not especially tasty, but if you're storing what you normally eat anyway, why shouldn't it be? So I thought I'd share a photo of breakfast this morning--oatmeal with dehydrated banana chips (I buy my banana chips at BulkFoods.com). Add a touch of honey, and talk about a yummy breakfast!