How We Organize A Deep Freezer

Seriously, how is it that I can organize our freezer and within a month it’s back to being a disaster. Every time! But I have finally figured it out! I saw this hack on Pinterest and figured what did I have to lose? If it doesn’t work, I can reuse the supplies. But if it works? Well, my sanity may just be returned. Maybe. So how did we organize a deep freezer?

Organizing A Deep Freezer

The biggest problems with freezers, whether upright or a chest freezer is that things get lost in the shuffle. It doesn’t matter what you do or how well you organize, you are going to lose stuff in those freezers. Not to mention it’s not something that you go into every day. Or maybe you go into it, but only for the 30 seconds it takes to pull out a couple packs of meat.

And if you have kids, they aren’t going to take the time to gently move things around to find what they need. No, my teenagers just throw things around until they find whatever it is they are looking for and them move on with their life…. It’s infuriating.

Starting To Organize A Deep Freezer

When you are sorting your deep freeze to organize it, make sure that you take the time to clean it out too. Over the years, I found that we tend to only clean out our deep freeze when we are getting a whole cow or hog, which is usually once a year per freezer. We usually purchase a whole cow in July and empty out that freezer, defrost it, and then scrub it out. And we do it for the whole hog in February.

This helps to make sure that any freezer burned meat is either used or given to the chickens. I tend to find a bunch of roasts and will can a bunch of soups for us for the winter. If the meat is just too burned, it goes to the dogs or chickens. I hate wasting food.

After it is sorted, make sure to defrost it. This allows you to get all those weird bits of meat, frost, and other random crap that gets lost in the freezer out. If you have had a freezer before, you know what I’m talking about. Especially, the upright freezers. Everything collects at the bottom of the freezer. Hunks of ice, broken caps, a random chicken wing. It ends up at the bottom!

Choosing The Right Size Freezer

When we purchase bulk meat like half/whole cows or whole hogs, we needed more freezer space than just one upright freezer. To give you some insight into freezer sizes, a whole cow will barely fit in an 16cu ft freezer. When I say barely, it’s a game of Tetris to get it all in there. Whole chickens take up a ton of space as well. I would say that you could probably fit 100 whole chickens in that same freezer.

I think it’s better to err on the side of caution and always go at least one “size” up from what you think you’ll need. Especially when it comes to getting whole animals. I have found that if you have the square footage to have a bigger freezer, get the bigger freezer. You will end up using the space. Trust me.

Another thing to consider with freezers is that an upright freezer will be easier to find things, but will not hold as much as you think they will. It is incredibly difficult to pack an upright freezer, no matter the size, due to the likelihood of things spilling out. And yes, milk crates will help with this, but just trust me, get a chest freezer if you are getting irregularly shaped things like packs of meat, veggies, etc.

Chest freezers are where it’s at in my opinion. Yes, it will become a holy terror of a disaster, but you get far more bang for your buck with them. Because it doesn’t matter if you organize it or not, you are able to use every square inch of that space.

Enter Milk Crates To Organize A Deep Freezer

When it comes to organizing a deep freezer, you need to have the ability to sort those various things (packs of meat, froze veggies, etc) into some sort of organized chaos. I love using milk crates. But a word of caution. Don’t buy cheap file crates from Wal-Mart. You want to get something like this. The sturdier the better. We got the cheap ones from Wal-Mart and it’s gone about how you would expect.

Milk crates saved my sanity when Jared brought home the cow. I’m not going to lie, I was nervous that three coolers of meat was going to create more chaos than me. But we worked through it and got everything separated into five milk crates. They are overflowing but still stackable.

The idea with the milk crates is to have the ability to pick up and move them to get to what is below them. So far it has worked beautifully and I will be buying more crates for my upright freezer to handle that disaster.

The problem with the using milk crates in the upright freezer is not having the ability to see through them to what is inside. Yes, we could label them but if my kids won’t put things up where they go, do we really think that putting a label on the crate will help? I guarantee it won’t.

Clearly Label What Is In The Freezer

We write on our freezers. This helps keep an eye on inventory levels…. when someone remembers to deduct what they took out…. which no one does. But it’s a good idea. We know that one freezer is full of beef and the other is full of… well other. Unfortunately, what ends up happening, especially with teenage boys, is that they just shove things in the freezer.

That means that you could have cow in one freezer, hog in another and chicken in with the bacon. It’s extremely frustrating. But if you label the outside of the freezer, it could help you a lot more. We have gone so far as to list out how many packs of something is in the freezer. For example, when we load up the freezer with a whole cow, we will put 200 packs of ground beef or 17 sirloin steaks.

This has helped a ton but only if you keep up with it.

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