Friday, March 12, 2010

Canning closet

Well, I did it. After several years of having my canning jars, rings, and lids scattered hither and yon, I finally got everything consolidated and (more or less) in one place.

Our house is kind of a strange house. It used to be a three-unit apartment, believe it or not, so when we first moved in we had three bathrooms and three kitchens. One of each was for the main apartment, but the other two sets of facilities were so small as to be functionally useless, so we gutted them.

Kind of. The little bathroom we call our "front room bathroom" no longer has working plumbing, but all the facilities are still in place. Eventually we will totally gut this space and transform it into my canning storage.

For the time being, all my full canning jars are being stored in our younger daughter's closet (which is this weird overly large walk-in space), but the unused jars and other paraphernalia were just put wherever there was room.

But last week I completely emptied out the front room bathroom, organized my jars into quarts, pints, and odd sizes, separated out my wide-mouthed and small-mouthed rings, and put my wide-mouth and small-mouth lids in separate boxes. Whoo-hoo!

Here are my boxes of canning rings stacked on the toilet. Large-mouth rings on the tank, small-mouth on the seat. And no, I don't know how I got all these rings. I certainly have never purchased any rings separately. I think they breed in the dead of night or while we're away.


My collection of wide-mouth lids...


And small-mouth lids.


This is my stack of pint jars. I tried to get a picture of my stacks of quart jars but the space was too narrow and I couldn't "fit" them in the camera view because they're stacked in the shower stall.


Some of the 3.5 gallon bakery buckets we get from a grocery store bakery ($2/each). These buckets are terrific - airtight and sturdy. I store our five-gallon buckets elsewhere, but these buckets hold the stuff I use on a more frequent basis - sugar, flour, rice, that kind of thing.

3 comments:

  1. Good for you! I know how good it feels to get this job done. I wrote a short piece on jar lids and thought you might enjoy it. http://frugalcanning.blogspot.com/2009/10/jar-rings.html
    I hang my lids threaded on rope and sorted by size for easy access. I just hang up the rope and don't have to use boxes. Just another option for folks.

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  2. I am still laughing because one year I lived in a small travel trailer whose bathroom was not functional. I stored all my canning equipment in the shower stall and it work quite well. That was a year I would not like to repeat but it was a great one for learning lessons.

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  3. Wow, and I thought I had alot of stored suger!
    You go girl! :-)

    Tina

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