Finding Room To Stockpile

Quite often people ask me where I find the room to stockpile.  The answer is simple - I make the room.  I'm not a hoarder by any stretch of the imagination.  Infact,  I love order and neatness and this helps me to make the most of the room I have.  My home is 15.23 squares or 141.57m2.  For my American readers that equates to 1523.8 square feet.  With four of us living here that doesn't allow for large amounts of storage.

Our kitchen is quite small and classified as a hostess kitchen which I think is a polite term for a small kitchen that does the job.  Our kitchen builder tells me that my pantry is quite a good size compared to others he sees. My pantry is 88cm wide x 57cm deep x 2.06 metres high. Not large at all but I can fit so much in there.  At the Adelaide workshop Cath and I held last year I showed a photo of my very tidy pantry. There were a few giggles about how neat it is. how many containers I have and how everything is in neat rows with ALL labels facing the front. A bit OCD ? Maybe, but when everything is neat and well stacked I'm making the most of the space.

I mentioned at the workshop that I only use my pantry to store food in. There are no empty containers, no extra rolls of paper towel, no toilet paper, no appliances, no cleaning products, no boxes of tissues, no canning jars and no cat food. These items are either stored in my garden shed or in the appropriate room ( cleaning products in the laundry etc ). 

 I also use everything in my kitchen on a regular basis and all my casserole dishes, chopping boards,  dinner sets etc are stacked neatly and efficiently.  This gives me the extra space to store supermarket specials  Before I had children, I worked in retail ( mostly toy shops ) and my specialty was merchandising shelves to fit more stock in when there was no space. I've just continued this at home and especially in my kitchen. I'm always sorting and rearranging my kitchen cupboards.

For those of you who think they can't find any more space to stockpile, just take a few moments to look at what you are storing.

*  Do you use it all the time ?
*  Are you keeping things you really shouldn't ?
*  Do you have too much of the wrong type of foods in your pantry ? This  question is targeted more towards junk food or food with too much packaging. Think about those packets of chips that are full of air or the individual serves of popcorn, chips etc etc. A jar of corn kernels takes up a fraction of the space compared to a packet of individual serves.
*  Could you store items in your linen cupboard ,  under your bed,  in the top of your wardrobe ?
*  Could you fill up all your containers to get rid of half empty packets taking up space ?

 By doing a little reorganising and decluttering,  you might be suprised at the space you can find.

Does your pantry and kitchen need a tidy up ?
Where do you store your extra stockpiling items ?