Plans shmans

I've been wanting to organize my canned food storage for a very long time. I'm sick of writing the date on every can with a sharpie and reaching behind a precariously stacked row of cream of chicken soup in order to keep the oldest cans in the front. And if we're being honest, I actually stack the flats on the garage floor and trip over them for two months before I get around to that step.

I was aware that there were plans online that you could purchase, telling you how to build your own can rotation system, but even then you pay only for the plans for say, the soup size or the veggie size. At twenty bucks a pop, that can get expensive and that's without buying the actual supplies. And due to frugality's tight grip on my psyche, I just couldn't do it. It goes without saying that I wasn't about to shell out the cash to buy them already made...that's fer city folk!

So I ran across some plans to make some out of cardboard. Here. I couldn't resist the free-ness of it and gave it a try. Not bad! Mine was a little wonky, due to it being my first try and all, and despite what you might think, I really don't have that much high quality cardboard kicking around. Although I did sneak across the street under the cloak of darkness and steal some out of the neighbor's recycling container. When I saw her put it out earlier that day, I thought, "Ooooh! Look at all that cardboard." You can see why Mark fell in love with me, right?

Once I get working on something, I have a limited window of time in which I'm feeling fired up about it...if it doesn't happen in the window, it's not happenin. So waiting for life to send me a package and making one at a time isn't going to work and the idea of shelling out cash for cardboard didn't appeal to me. The great thing about making one of these puppies out of cardboard is that the process taught me that this is not rocket science. All you need are two sides, a back, shelves with a 2" slope and something to stop the cans from rolling out onto the floor.

The wheels started turning (in mah noggin) and I came up with the plans for all the sizes I needed. I bought 12 sheets of pressed fiber board and used our electricity-rich snow days to work on these:


I'm in love with them.

Good bye sharpie! Good-bye reaching behind the shelves where there may or may not be large poisonous spiders to retrieve cans that have fallen back there! Hello, sending kids to get me anything I ask for!

Okay, so I won't bore you with instructions, but I will say that if you want to do this, I'd be more than happy to share the knowledge and of course, help in anyway I can. I promise not to charge you (except for any item you would like to give me that may or may not contain pecans).

You will need some type of saw. I used my scroll saw because that's all I have, but a table saw would make it substantially easier. You will also need wood glue, the more clamps the better (I have two, so it was a process), and a large square...you can borrow mine.

You can make them in any size:



And you can also do them in cardboard, of course...and it works fine. There's mine on the bottom right of the picture:

It's surprisingly sturdy, and if you have a bunch of cardboard, you can't beat the price. The ones I made out of fiberboard came out to cost about 3 dollars per unit. Oh, and can you tell that the one to the left of the cardboard one was my first fiberboard experiment? It's a bit on the crooked side and the bottom lip is too short, so if you aren't gentle, when you pull out a can of soup, the next one will come at you with a vengeance. Live and learn. I plan on writing, "BEWARE!" on that one, so my kids will escape a can to the head. Or maybe I'll fill it with cream of celery....that's only a can to the head twice a year.