Hey y'all! Remember so many moons ago when I set a monthly goal of freezer and fridge organization? Yeah, I think that was April. And this is what we were dealing with.

So, I think of myself as a pretty organized person. I, er, blog about it from time to time. But the fridge and freezer are just total chaos zones for us. I spent a lot of time thinking about why it was so chaotic, and then what we could do to fix it. I also considered the actual level of organization we needed and should aspire to.

As for why it's so chaotic, here's what I think:

1. Space. We have a small, apartment-sized refrigerator. And though I try to buy the amount of groceries we need and can reasonably eat before it goes to waste, sometimes things balloon, especially when you consider adding in leftovers.

2. Multiple Users. There are zones in our house that belong exclusively to one person, and those tend to stay fairly organized. It's when you add a couple adults and a child that things can get messy quickly, because instead of everyone knowing and/or intuiting one spot for things, people put things wherever.

3. Lots of change. The linen closet stays pretty static. The refrigerator does not. We constantly change things by eating and cooking and adding and subtracting. Groceries are delivered once a week, and I usually have them delivered early in the morning. That time works great for having something to eat that day, but not great for neatly putting things away, because we're also running out the door for camp and making coffee and shoving food down our throats.

And why I think things need to change? Mostly because it's so darn inefficient. Searching for food in the fridge while I'm trying to eat or cook is so annoying. Not being able to find something is triply so. And worst of all is all the food we waste because we can't see it, don't use it or buy more when we already have it. Also, I like pretty, organized things.

So let's start with the freezer. Ours is kinda tiny, and the shelves have limited mobility, so it was tough to find a solution for storing things of different sizes. Then there was the constant problem of white plastic bags. Once we opened a bag of fruit or vegetables we would knot a rubber band around the remaining contents, throw the bag back in the freezer and hope we'd be able to identify it later.

We couldn't. Even a "thorough" search often wouldn't yield up the bag of frozen peas we were looking for, and there was no way to take a look at things quickly to take stock of what we had when it came time for meal planning or scrounging. It took me a bit of time to figure out what to do about this, but eventually I realized that I could quickly and easily identify the items in clear plastic freezer bags - things like homemade veggie stock and fruits I'd purchased fresh and frozen before they went bad. So I took that to a new level, emptying almost all the food into clear plastic bags.

What a difference. Decanting things into plastic bags not only made everything easy to see, but also had the result of keeping everything in uniform containers, which is so much easier to organize around. Once I had things in bags, I labeled, including cooking instructions, where necessary.

Then I grouped items, where I thought it made sense to do so. I love these plastic containers with handles, which make pulling out the goods easy. I know I want to reduce plastic in our lives, but I'm glad I already got these. I bought those dry-erase labels from Target ages ago, and these are similar. Finally, this roll of Scotch Dry Erase Tape is steadily changing my life. I used it to create a few labels as well. I've said it before, and so has everyone else: If you want something to be organized, you have to put a label on it.

So, I'm pretty stoked about this system. It's not new; we've been using it for a bit and it's staying basically the same. That's not to say it's always picture perfect, but it's so, so much better than before. It was well worth the time it took to organize, and the slightly longer time it takes to put away groceries and leftovers to keep things tidy. Have any all-star tips for keeping these chaotic places relatively organized? Do tell. In the meantime, next up, the fridge!