Spring Cleaning One Little Step at a Time / Your Refrigerator, Part 1

From my windowsill:

I have a side-by-side refrigerator in our kitchen.  This week I tackled inventory-ing its contents and in the process ended up cleaning out the right side and door.   I put one of the photos on my Facebook and had LOTS of comments, so I thought I'd share it with you as well.  It took me about 2 1/2 hours which I had set aside on Wednesday morning for the project.   

Here are the BEFORE photos:

and the AFTER photos.

I took everything out of the refrigerator and set it on the counters and kitchen table so I could see what I had and cleaned each shelf with Windex including the little lunchmeat drawer.     My refrigerator shelves have not been this clean in ages!

I then grouped similar items together in the refrigerator with leftovers mainly taking over the bottom shelf.  The items in the door aare now grouped by similarity as well.  There's even some EMPTY space in the frig and I can actually see what I have in there.  

I also tried using a software rather than just keeping a list of the contents.  It's called Pantry 1.2.7 for Mac and can be downloaded for free online.  They have it for Windows, I'm sure, as well.    Not sure if I'll keep up with it but I really do need some kind of running inventory list so I don't buy things I already have. I do stock-up grocery shopping but when you have 10 boxes of Uncle Ben's rice, that's a bit much.  :)  It is pretty  handy if you have a laptop and can put it wherever you store food.  We'll see if I'm consistant.

UPDATE ON THIS:  I used this program for about 45 minutes and deleted it. Too time-consuming and you can't change the quantities on hand at all.  I switched to Word's Excel program which I mention in Saturday's blog.

I hope to do the right side of the refrigerator (the freezer section) today.  Photos of that tomorrow.  :)