Reorganizing My Pantry & LTFS

 

I am constantly tweaking my spaces to make them function better and my pantry and long term food storage (LTFS) is one of those areas I’ve enjoyed messing with.  Anything I get to do in the kitchen makes me happy.

 

This bin no longer resides here 😁

Last month I really went to town taking advantage of sales, promos, special offers and digital coupons to shave off the overall cost of my grocery expenses recreating my kitchen working pantry and my LTFS.  I even added a new tiny freezer and a brand new refrigerator with a top fridge freezer on the bottom.  Plenty of space for me to store fresh and frozen items.

 

Before

After 💗

The pantry in my tiny house is anything but.  It is slightly narrower than the pantry I had in my old house and has fewer shelves, but more than adequate to meet my needs.  Early on I added two larger hanging baskets to hold smaller items like spice and gravy packets, a Jiffy cornbread mix or two, small snacks, that sort of thing.  They have been working out really well.

 

I feel this pantry setup is adequate to meet my needs

I thought I might need to add shelves, but that doesn’t seem to be the case right now.  I was able to move things around and stack my canned goods in a way that it very workable.  I can easily see and access what I have and nothing topples over, which is very important.  The pantry primarily holds the items I regularly use.  Once I open something and use it I move a replacement from the LTFS and then add that item to my next shopping list for replacement.  Once I have purchased that item I put it back into the LTFS.  I call it the “pull and replace method” and it works very well for me to maintain inventory without over buying.

 

Costco bacon crumbles

When I do buy in bulk I like to portion out what I know I will use and vacuum seal packets or packages for the LTFS or deep freezer.  When I purchased bacon crumbles I placed half a cup into a half pint jar for the fridge and then vacuum sealed the rest in half cup packets.  The packets were placed into a Ziploc bag for storage just to organize them so they wouldn’t get lost in the bottom of the freezer.

 

I like to fill my food storage jars, which are simply quart and pint Mason jars, with items I am using like flours, sugar, dried fruit, rice, dry beans, etc.  If I have a partial package leftover after I’ve filled my jars I will place them into a Ziploc or vacuum seal bag and store them back in the LTFS until I need it again.  I find it really helps me to keep things fresh for longer periods of time.

 

Jack has his own pantry space 😻

and LTFS 😸

Jack’s canned food and dry food canister sit on the top shelf next to my overabundance of coffees and that is working well.  He does have his own LTFS bin which I keep under my bed right now.  He’s fine with it as he tends to spend quite a bit of time under there as well.

 

I'm storing my water reserves here on the floor of the pantry

On the floor of the pantry I placed my vacuum food sealer and bags, my potatoes and cleared out an area for water storage.  I have a flat of bottled water that I got for FREE on promo from my local supermarket and I have plans to expand this area with more stored water.  We’ve already had one water outage that fortunately only lasted a few hours, but if you need a drink of water, you need a drink of water.  At the time I was definitely not prepared.

 

The bulk of the LTFS, both food and non food resides in the cabinet over my refrigerator.  I soon realized I was able to store all three cloth bins on top of the cabinet to hold lighter weight items like pasta, baking mixes, rice mixes, dehydrated potatoes as well as my stockpile of toiletries and cleaning supplies.  Since I don’t need to get in there very often this is working out really well.

 

Other than the fridge, freezers, pantry, cabinet over the fridge and those three bins I do not have anything stored anywhere else with the exception of a few bulkier items – TP, tissues and paper towels.  I do store those in my bedroom closet.  As far as food goes however, I have no plans to expand my food and nonfood storage any further.  What I currently have set up for that purpose is more than enough.

 

The tiny deep freezer holds quite a bit 😎

I was really surprised at how quickly I was able to put this together and how little it ended up costing me to do this once I was done.  Moving forward I will be operating in the “pull and replace method” mode and the only addition that is planned is my next Butcher Box order coming in mid November.  After that I will be putting my subscription on hold because it is an amazing quantity of meat and I can’t eat it all in two months, not by a long shot.  I’m curious now to see how long I actually go before I need to place another order for beef.

 

That is it.  That is my pantry and LTFS all neat and organized.  What do you think?  Have I missed anything?