Tin Can Treasure Trove?

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for your support so far, it’s been absolutely lovely. I’ll continue to be there for each and every one of you whenever I can, don’t be afraid to email me or find me over on Twitter.

Today I got started on my own stockpile (caution: lots of pictures). It’s a rainy Wednesday and I’m stuck in with a mild throat infection, but trying to get the house in shape for Christmas. Trying being the operative word- hunting for bags of random tin cans that I’ve been slowly squirrelling away since early summer; clearing a space under the stairs for the tins to go in crates; starting some kind of logging system, knowing I have the executive skills of a pre-teen.

Yep, my house is a complete tip, and that’s not even in the “being modest about my palace” kind of way. It’s bad. But eventually bags of tins began to merge and lots of recycling and a bit of trashing gave me a space under the stairs. So what better way to start than randomly piling all the tins into the new clean space?

Yeah. Smart.

Luckily I have a husband with a practical head, who had a box of cheap crates ordered from the internet. Cardboard boxes would work just fine for this if you’re strapped for cash, but there’s a radiator in this space so we needed something that wasn’t going to set on fire and get us in trouble with the local council.

Ta-dah!!

So at the back of the space went all of our camping equipment, butane canisters, the big bags of pasta and cat food, and a bag of packet food.

Then finally I started trying to figure out a system for my crates of tinned food. Waving goodbye to the Playstation 2 games in the large box (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Dutch, noooo) I set some crates up, using the dog cage as a barrier against the radiator. These I have labelled from bottom to top- 1A, 1B, 1C etc. Each crate has a list in my book of what kinds of food are in there, every can with a Best Before date and the weight of the food inside for calorie counting.

Still a long way to go, but after a quick coffee and mince pie I’ll try and have this done before lunch.

Would love to see pictures of your stockpiles, and hear which systems you use to log everything, if any. It’s hard to be organised with this sort of thing without feeling like it’s a step too far into Hystericalsville, but knowing the dates of each tin will hopefully make it easier to know what can potentially be donated to a local food bank at a later date.

Thanks for bearing with me!

Samantha