Working on the hidden room

I took apart some of the shelves in the garage.  I put them together in the hidden room and have started moving things in.  It's going to be so nice to have the "home grocery store" all in one place!  I had my food buckets in the closet in my room, food in the large pantry and also in a china hutch in the mud room, and then the main storage out in the garage. 

Each shelf unit is four feet wide, 18 inches deep, and seven feet tall.  There are six shelves per unit.  All my shelving came from Fresno Rack and Shelving and Bakersfield Rack and Shelving (depending on where I was working that day).  They are really heavy duty and a bit cheaper than the gorilla racks from the hardware stores.  The nice thing about getting it from the shelving company is you can get exactly what you need.  12, 15, 18, 24 inches wide.  Five, six, seven feet high.  They will cut the shelves while you wait.  I think they come with five shelves but I like six better.  It's not a lot more to add the extra shelf. 

I don't have any of the 12 inch deep shelving.  The 15 is good for holding cases of canned goods but the 18 will hold a lot more even though it's only three inches deeper.  I put 18s into the hidden room.  I have 24 inch deep shelves in the garage but those hold the bins of clothes and other larger items (ice chests, etc).  I'm setting up three sets of shelves to start.  I have room for a fourth shelf since the room is 17 feet long.  Since the room is only four feet wide, having 24 inch deep shelves wouldn't give me enough room to move around.  I can store other things along the wall if I want.  We'll see.  

I will be able to keep my inventory more accurate since everything will be in one place.  It's going to take a while to get everything located in the exact place I want it on the shelves.  I don't keep the shelves in a hodgepodge.  It's really orderly.  I think about how things are set up in the grocery store and try to keep the same groupings.  

This week's mission for the grand kids Sunday school is to be kind and helpful to your parents.  It's a hard one to teach them about honoring your parents when their parents have been abusive.  Wait, they aren't your parents anymore.  I am!  Their adoption was final a year and two days ago.  You have to be nice to me!  So today they came in my room at 6:00 to give me my menu for breakfast in bed.  They wanted to cook pancakes, waffles, eggs, and breakfast muffins.  How about a cup of coffee?  They brought me that, spilling and sipping along the way.  I got half a cup. 

Let me sleep until 6:30 please.  After I got up I headed to the kitchen to supervise the scrambled egg cooking.  I told them there were left over pancakes in the refrigerator so no making more.  They toasted some bread.  They also got out some tortillas and put the eggs and some shredded cheese into each tortilla.  They slathered it with taco sauce.  Breakfast was ready.  It was all pretty good except for the massive amount of sauce.  Why do kids always think more is better?  They get to check off helping with a meal. 

We've had some ants in the kitchen the last couple of days.  They aren't after anything, they always come into the house after the first few rainfalls.  I've been spraying the area they come in with my bleach water.  It seems to deter them.  This morning boy told me that there were ants so he sprayed the area with the bleach water but he also wanted to trap them.  He knows we have sticky pads to catch mice so he figured he can do the same for the ants.  He poured a line of syrup on the counter so the ants would get stuck!  I was surprised that I didn't get mad for more than a split second.  I caught myself before I scolded him.  Ants LOVE syrup.  We need to keep all the food put away.  Do you see I put the bowl of scraps for the chickens into the middle of the dishpan with an inch of water in the bottom of the pan?  That's so the ants can't get to the scraps.  They won't cross the water. 

The grand kids are spending the night with their cousin.  I'm going to go back to moving food.  I have a lot of office work to do tomorrow then the kids are coming home and bringing the baby cousin with them.  Don't think I'll get much food moving done tomorrow evening.