Im at a point where I know I have to clean up my house. Some areas are a lot easier than others. Kitchen items and cake items have always been a sticky area for me. While I dont have a lot of room in my kitchen for appliances, I still want to hold on to some things like the crock pot that I do use or the food processor that gets used occasionally. I also have many serving dishes/tray/ that my SIL has bought me for Christmas over the years. I love them, they are different shapes, and white as requested, so that they would be functional with any dish set I have down the line.

Ive decided that while I love having a cake room (this is also where kitchen overflow goes), I really need to repurpose the room in general and use it for more than just cake/kitchen stuff. If I did cakes all the time then maybe Id feel differently. But I just dont do them near as much as I did. I do not want to get rid of a majority of my stuff though. First because I have spent a lot of money on it, second because I do plan to have kids and figure I will pick it back up more then for birthdays and such. And when that happens I dont want to have to go back and rebuy a bunch of stuff because I sold it off for less than I paid.

The room is pretty much a square, no closet, 4 walls, two windows and a door. In a perfect world, (where I wasnt renting the house and had plenty of money to spare) Id see about having cabinets built along at least one of the walls. But that just isnt possible. I also dont want to spend a ton of money on storage cabinets that dont really fit for what I need to put in them. So my idea now is to try to eliminate two of the shelving units from the room. And by the way when I say shelving units we are talking those ones that are like 48x72x18. I wont completely do away with them but do plan to move them out to the storage room I have. I do have the thought of repurposing a chest of draws and putting it in the room for my office supplies and for craft supplies and putting this in the cake room.


The point of this post is, if you had to move some of your cake stuff outside to a storage building what would you move out? The storage build does have a door on it, so it is protected from the elements (like rain) but there is no AC/Heat in there. Id still have everything stored in plastic containers with lids and with the shelving units they will be up off the ground.

I know there are things like gel pastes, candy flavoring, candy melts that will need to stay inside. Im sure the cake pans and cookie cutters would be okay in the storage building as long as I protect them from dirt/dust. But things like candy molds, silicone molds and veiners are questionable to me. I do live in Texas, and the last 4 days our temps have been hanging out right above freezing during the day, and we do have 100+ summers.

What items would you keep inside the house and what items would you move to a storage room?

i can't help with which items to store where, but i would highly suggest getting some of the silica gel packs (like what you find in your shoes and bags when you buy them) to help absorb any moisture that might accumulate in the tubs. Dont' want anything to get moldy while it's out there.

I think you're right, pans and other metal things would be fine to store outside. I'd hesitate to keep plastic outside because the heat could warp it. Paper goods would be likely to be chewed by mice or nested in by cockroaches.

I don't do cakes as much as I used to...I've put most of the things I don't use often into storage bins and just stacked them in my garage. If I didn't have a garage, I'd probably try to stick them on the closet shelves above my washer. It would be hard to stick them outdoors, thinking of the money I've spent on all that stuff.

Leily, there has been clothes and pictures stored out there, that is fine, so I'm hoping the other stuff would be too.

Texas_Rose, the storage building is behind my garage (both unattached to the house). My garage was used for storage before I moved in, so alot of that stuff is still there, and then other stuff has been added from family for a garage sale. Between the two the storage building is better, it is easier to get into, and I think more closed off than the garage with the big pull up metal door.

My washer and drier are in a little alcove in my kitchen. There really isn't alot of room above them. I could probably have another shelf added above the existing shelf (that is already being used), but it wouldn't be easy to access with the design of the alcove. And it wouldn't hold much to really be worth it.

I'm at a point where I either have to figure out creative storage, or get rid of it, because I have to get my house in order, for my sanity.

If clothes do okay out there, it should be fine. I had an outdoor storage closet when I had an apartment, and we had our winter clothes stored in bags inside boxes in it. When we went to get them out, they had been chewed up and peed on by some kind of little animals.

Maybe you should take advantage of the nice cool weather and have that garage sale? I'm thinking of doing that pretty soon...I had to move in such a hurry that my garage is still piled with boxes and things. My kids are a couple of pack rats too.

The only reason I was mentioning above the washer and drier is that I don't use my shelf there because I can't reach things on it easily...so every time I'm doing laundry I'm looking at the shelf and thinking of all the things I could possibly store there.

Well here is has been more than nice and cool. We finally hit 40 today, the first time in days!

We will have a garage sale, but it will probably be in March before it happens. I have plenty more things to go through before I'll be ready for that point. And my mom wants to go through her house too. I'm just trying to get things out and in the storage room so I have more room in the house.

At the moment I don't have room for the cake stuff in the storage room, because it does have alot of garage sale stuff that has collected there for the last 5 years. My garage and storage building became dumping ground for everyones stuff they don't want. Which is okay, because I've decided when we have the garage sale if it has been in my storage building because they don't want it, then I get the money for it. HeHe.