How do you organise your chest freezer?

Slinky

I'm struggling to organise our chest freezer to be able to find things easily. At the moment I'm putting similar things together in carrier bags and lugging them out to find what I want, but think there must be a better way.


I've got a magnetic whiteboard which is stuck to the top of the freezer which in theory lists what the contents are, but my random bags can't be the best way of doing this.


What do you do?

skeeter93

I tried stacking like things together, ie breads at one end, meat at the other. Small things in the baskets at the top. I tried cardboard boxes. Every just falls in together after a while. The best thing I tried was the reusable canvas bags. Meats one colour, vegies another, desserts and fruits another. Then I grouped like things in each bag - IE Dessert bags blue - 1 had all ice cream type things, another had frozen fruits. So I had to pull out a bag, but I knew which colour it was, and I could peek in the bag before pulling it out to check what it was.

retiredlady

Organise? Lol! I start off organised but within a month it's a bit like a treasure hunt!

Princess_kate

This is the downside to a chest freezer, I've thought about sorting it into bags etc but I just try to keep it tidy & seem to be able to locate things quite easily, just a pain having to move things out of the way all the time to find what you're after!

MrsChristmas

Agree, it's quite an impossible task!
I just try to make sure the new stuff goes at the bottom & the older stuff makes it to the top, keeping a mental note of what is in there but it means pulling everything out every so often.

Casperthefriendlyghost

I use see through boxes with lids so I can stack them. Vegetables on the left, breads and cooked meals in the middle and meat on the right. I keep similar veges together in each box and the meat I put chicken in one, beef and lamb in the other and pork, bacon, sausages etc in the other one.
You can get so many sizes of the clear plastic boxes and I've found this helps. I also don't buy more stuff until I've used things up.

Things that need using up are kept in the little basket at the top.

Cheers
Casper
xx

CH27

I use different colour bags to organise my Dad's.

Green for veg
Red for meat

Cottage_Economy

I use plastic boxes mostly (i went through a period of taking home all the empty family circle biscuit boxes from work) and stack them. I try and keep main food groups together. However, most of what I have is small bagged items, not boxes, so it is easier to squeeze bits together.

If necessary though, i do repack things into smaller bags to save on space and often break things into two portion sizes.

PasturesNew

When I opened up my sibling's small one and decided to organise her (not invited to, she wasn't even in the same county at the time) ... I put everything similar together - and anything that was already opened I put into the top racks. That meant that things already opened would be visible, so more likely to be finished off, rather than languishing at the bottom until they're not fancied as "that's been open some time now, not sure how long".

janb5

My friend had the same problem but you can get " hamster baskets" online ( think they are called that to store stuff in. Works well according to her.

Slinky

janb5 wrote: »

My friend had the same problem but you can get " hamster baskets" online ( think they are called that to store stuff in. Works well according to her.

Presumably you mean these http://www.hamsterbaskets.co.uk/baskets.html

Looks like they could be a good solution, thanks very much!