This week, I am thrilled to announce…it’s finally here!
As part of our basement renovation, A. and I planned to create a pretty large size surplus pantry for bulk food storage.
About a month ago, I shared one update relating to this pantry: the movement of our deep freezer and the addition of floor-to-ceiling shelving for some of our bagged and boxes pantry items (which I store in large plastic totes to deter any pest-y friends).
A. and his dad have been hard at working laying walls and putting up sheetrock, and we finally made enough progress for the shelves on the wall opposite this one to go up!
I was so excited by the shelving, I didn’t even remember to take a photo of the bare shelves. We’ve been using surplus flooring (which is basically a fancy form of plywood) for lots of shelving projects in our house. It’s not beautiful, but it’s super sturdy and free since it’s all leftover!
We have a bit more progress to make before this project is truly finished. We’ll add a strip to the front of each shelf to prevent items from tipping forward off the shelves, add one more shelf at the very top, and I’ll definitely be canning more items to stock the shelves better.
I’ve been holding off building up our surplus food storage too much because I knew I would need to move the food around multiple times before this pantry was finally finished. I’ve already gotten started home canning more items though, and I’ll be using a small chunk of my grocery budget each week to add store-bought items we use regularly too.
I’ll try to report back with another update once we’ve made those final additions.
Got any good tips for bulk food storage? We’d love to hear it. Drop us a comment below!