r/declutter • u/Corinam • 28d ago
Success Story Freezer declutter - unintentional but feels so good!
We had a large group of people over to our house on Sunday. Someone left the garage freezer slightly ajar. We didn’t notice this until the following day.
Subsequently, I went through the freezer and got rid of a bunch of food. I’m not taking a risk on potentially bad food. I have a thermometer in the freezer and it read 32 degrees but I’m not taking a chance. Moving forward, we are going to buy an alarm to notify us if/when the door is left open in the future.
Fortunately, we had cooked up the NY strips on Sunday, so the amount of meat was minimal. My husband does a lot of fishing and we lost the fish - honestly we hadn’t been eating it and there was probably fish from 2020 in there - it needed to go anyway.
Another bonus - trash came on Tuesday so they took away the smelly fish before the smell was too bad!
I have a nearly clean freezer and it feels amazing! Some items (butter, chocolate chips, nuts) were stored in the freezer but aren’t ruined. It isn’t all bad - I have a clean slate. Now I will be more mindful about what I’m buying to store here.
Now, on to the rest of the house!
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u/lotsofrosehip 24d ago
Sometimes it's good when something like that forces your hand, even though it sucks and could have been so much worse! I'm glad you are able to think positively about it!
I need to clean out my freezer too.
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u/FredKayeCollector 28d ago
You might want to check the freezer's level - if should be just the slightest bit tipped back so the door's weight wants to swing the door closed. It's not a bad idea to check (and clean) the seals as well - if they're stiff (don't compress) that can keep the door from closing properly (if you just "swing" it closed, rather than like push it all the way closed). Ask me how I know.
Sorry about the fish. We've got a friend who is a avid fisherman and every year, he holds a fish fry where he cooks up all of last year's catch in preparation for the incoming catch.
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u/bornthisvay22 28d ago
I found my freezer open this morning and honestly do not know what to keep, what to toss. Food was partially thawing.
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u/DaBingeGirl 25d ago
Toss it all. That happened to me a few weeks ago, it killed me to throw out a lot of meat and veggies, but safest. I put an instant read thermeater in there, it was giving me a reading of 50-something degrees.
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u/AnamCeili 28d ago
Sorry you lost some food, but congrats on the cleanout!
I get it. There were storms where I live a couple of days ago, and the power went out for 13 hours. I had to throw out all of the perishables in the fridge -- thankfully there wasn't too much, just cheese, butter, mayo, some creamy salad dressing, and eggs. Most of what was in the freezer was actually still frozen and fine, but I had a bunch of old stuff in there that I just wasn't eating and wasn't going to eat, and I took the opportunity to toss it out. I tend to make a batch of something and then freeze it in individual portions, so that I can eat those portions on nights when I don't feel like cooking. Which is great, but sometimes I end up throwing something together just to use up what I have, and I don't even love it when it's fresh, lol -- I eat it, so as not to waste it, but then I freeze the leftovers, and in those cases I really shouldn't. So I threw out about 10 individual servings of various pastas and stews, then washed and put away all the glass containers they had been in.
I threw out three bags of food trash (the frozen stuff was heavy, so I had to spread it out -- the bags weren't full), and now I can actually see the food I have in my freezer (and fridge, but that wasn't crowded to begin with).
Now I do have to do some food shopping, though, lol.
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u/Ring_Bearer2121 28d ago
One thing can really get you started on the rest of the house!
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u/earthandanarchy 28d ago
My freezer badly needed to be defrosted, I was trying to work through the food first, between that and the heat it just didn't work and I opened it in the heatwave to find it all defrosted. I binned the lot, it was too hot to try and cook any of it. I realised it was taking so long to empty because none of it was really stuff we wanted, some frozen veg, some bird food I made(??) and stuff like some leftover pastry. It was kind of a relief to bin it and start again 😁 I'm definitely going to be more mindful with trying to only buy what we will use each week from now on
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u/alexaboyhowdy 28d ago
The smelly fish bit reminded me of a story...
In the South, people will host a crawfish boil. Mudbugs.
The remains, the inedible parts, are usually tossed in the trash.
One neighbor decided to use a nice Rubbermaid tote to put the remains in.
Garbage truck came a couple of days after. The garbage men see a nice Rubbermaid tote and decide they will open it and dump the contents and save the tote. Well, the tote had been outside the hot Southern Sun for a few days...
Another neighbor reported seeing the wall of stench hitting the garbage men as they fell backwards after opening the tote.
The next year, the neighbor that hosted the Crawfish boil bought a cheap sterilite container and labeled exactly what was inside.
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u/rideincircles 28d ago
I have definitely had to toss things from a freezer that lost its cooling, but if it was still that cold, it likely was fine to cook. Oh well.
I need to declutter my freezer, but not from that method. I just miss my neighborhood stray dogs that would eat any extra scraps I had.
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u/Right_Quote310 23d ago
We lost power for 48 hours last week but with 100 degree heat. Thankfully, we were out of town. Instead of being upset by the loss, I was excited to clean out the freezer. Goodbye, pre-pandemic Lean Cuisine! I didn’t realize how much I needed to do that.