This doesn’t happen often but once I went into the kitchen and started picking up, I couldn’t stop. I’ve thrown out things that I’ve had for years and never used. Vince is probably not going to be so happy when he sees I’ve almost filled up the big trash can – 6 kitchen trash bags of junk so far! There are things I’ve saved just because I didn’t want to throw them out but I know Chad is going to throw them out when I’m gone and it really isn’t something I want to keep, nor do I want to find a place to store it and, it felt quite good to throw stuff out.
Remember when Rita chewed through her two heating pads . . at least six months ago? Vince saved them. He was going to do something with them. They’re big and bulky. They’ve been sitting in the breakfast room all this time. I know I’ved asked him half a dozen times what he’s going to do with them; when he’s going to do it; can he put them in his shop. Nope . . sitting in the breakfast room. They’re in the trash now. Really, folks! It isn’t like he has nothing to do. He has plenty to do. There’s still a 3D printer sitting in the box in the breakfast room. That’s big! And ugly! Put it somewhere else!
We’re also going to talk about grocery buying once the football game is over. Vince will go to the store and come home with so much stuff so either I have to adjust my meal plan or put it on the next week’s menu plan and that just doesn’t always work. I’m going to suggest that whatever he buys, if it wasn’t on a list I handed him, he is responsible for cooking and if he doesn’t cook it, he has to be the one to throw it out. I don’t think he realizes how much food we’re wasting.
Last night he was shocked that my grocery order didn’t include any food. I needed to meet the $35 minimum and I needed shelf paper so I got baby powder (which I use), ice cream (which I eat), mace (which Chad told me I need – the spice). I did get tomato juice for making tomato soup and I got sour cream for our potatoes and the sauce for our meat today. That’s about it. I ordered two heads of cabbage because I wanted to make cabbage rolls this week but they were out of cabbage. I should have known – New Year’s Day!
Our cabinets are the same way. Vince will buy every kind of chip, cookie, cracker – most never get eaten . . which is a good thing, but he needs to stop buying that stuff. I’m happy for him to buy the things he will eat but just buying and sticking in the cabinet . . no. Nothing ever gets cleaned out, it just gets pushed farther back in the cabinet.
Vince has an “office” which is really the largest bedroom except for our room and it might even be as big as our room. He has the entire downstairs family room. He has the downstairs full size garage. He has the new shop. He has the third bay of the main level garage. He still has two storage rental units. Don’t feel bad that I’m asking him to get his stuff out of the breakfast room!
Elle says
6 garbage bags? I’m speechless. Definitely time for that talk. Looks like this game will go into OT (if he’s watching KC/CIN).
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Sorry . . I’m never clear. The 6 bags wasn’t all food. It was a lot of “stuff”. We’ve saved old sheets forever . . for moving. We’re not moving again! I stuffed two bags full of old sheets to take to the animal rescue place. I’ve saved every size jar and lid forever (olives, jalapenos, peppers) to use when freeze drying but I mostly use pint Mason jars now so they all stack easy so I threw out a lot of that. As I dug through the layers stacked in the breakfast room, there was packing material – not all mine but a lot of envelopes from 123 Stitch because I thought I might re-use them. Nope, they’re in the trash. I had ordered quite a bit of food type items, as well as soap, toothpaste, etc. from Sam’s and it had been sitting in the corner of the breakfast room so I opened all that and put it away and that left a lot of boxes and plastic wrappers. Anyway, it’s a lot of stuff out of the house.
Liz says
.. I know this may sound weird, but… can you set up a shelf in the kitchen as well as on the garage shelving which is for Vince’s carbs – sort of a “first in first out” inventory system. Have to eat the stuff in the house before you can grab the same or similar item from the garage stash??? And the visual of seeing what he has as he goes out of the house may impact the shopping??? Maybe not.
He may complain about it, but unlike fabric, yarn and floss, food does have an expiration date. Or, have him empty the crackers, etc into the mason jars or bags and make him vacuum seal them and store them – give him a whole shelf area for his stuff. You figure out the storage needs for meats, veggies, meals, etc for a year. Make him figure out the storage needs for his favorites.
I know…. it is just wishful thinking…
judy.blog@gmail.com says
We actually have two places for Vince’s junk food. One is in an upper cabinet that I can’t reach easily and there’s a corner cabinet with three shelves and I told him . . take the whole cabinet. I’ll never even open it and still, there’s junk food everywhere I look. We wouldn’t store it in the garage because I don’t want mice or other or roaches to think we have good stuff in our garage. Plus the heat would ruin it so it would only work for winter.
No, when he goes shopping, he loses all sense of reality.
Liz says
” he loses all sense of reality” – Well, you can’t adjust for that issue….. but you could try during the winter months to get the point across. And if he packed the stuff into mason jars, it would be safe from critters… about the heat – wouldn’t that give him a good reason not to buy so much? I know, it’s a guy thing….sorry…
When I buy flour, I put 6.5 cups into large mason jar and vacuum seal it – it is the amount for my basic bread recipe. I have labeled the caps so that when I have so many, it is time to restock on the flour, sugar or whatever….
Hmm… may be time to make some bread…. I like winter months since I tend to bake more… and make soups and other goodies…. for the new year, I made eggnog brioche bread pudding. I added dried cherries and it was wonderful.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
When I buy flour, I buy two 50 pound bags at a time so I dump it into 5 gallon buckets with Gamma Seal lids.
I’m not going to go to a lot of trouble and I definitely don’t want my Mason jars in the garage getting knocked around and broken. Vince is going to do what Vince is going to do and I’m not going to stress about it but I do want him to somehow think about the amount of $$ he’s wasting.
The eggnog brioche bread pudding sounds amazing. I want some NOW! 🙂
RuthW in MD says
I feel for you on Vince’s junk food buying!!
We’ve started going to the grocery store together regularly now. I check with him before I go by myself, to see if there is anything he has NOT written down on the list. We keep a list on the cupboard door of what we’ve run out of, and of things we want. We go over the list together before we leave, and check through the cupboards and fridge, and the “garage store” as well. (He used to make a long list of EVERYTHING we buy and put check marks on it. It was too hard to work with. I ignored that list. It disappeared.)
We’ve managed to set up rules that are easy to maintain.
“If you eat the last of a package, check for the backup package and put it in the “use me now” space.”
“Write down what you want that is no longer in the house or garage store.”
Sometimes we have to discuss “rotation of stock”!
The most important action in our house is to have only two places for food items – one place in the kitchen for current use, and one place for backup items in the “garage store”.
Some fridge items have backup pkgs in the bottom drawer, or two on the main shelf. Only one fridge, thank goodness!
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Sounds like you have a great plan. Vince is so impulsive when it comes to buying things, then sticks them in the fridge and forgets about them or piles them up somewhere and they get buried. It really does make my cooking job harder when I have a meal plan but have to make adjustments to include whatever he bought. There are ways I love zucchini but it isn’t one of my favorite “I could eat every day” veggies. If he finds it on sale, he’ll buy way more than we can eat before it goes bad and somehow, he can’t get that a bargain is not a bargain, no matter how little it costs, if it doesn’t get used.