If you’ve read my Big 3 post for my February goals, you’ll know that one of my main goals for this month is to do a big clean-out of both of our freezers, since we have stuff that’s been in there for AGES. As our income is on the lighter side in the winter anyway, this will also double nicely as a frugality challenge since I’m hoping it will help keep our grocery costs low for this month.
The challenge is fairly straightforward, but I’m hoping that making myself accountable on here will help ME to actually stick with it and will help give YOU some motivation to maybe look in your own freezers 🙂 Comment below if you’re planning on joining!
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The Great Freezer Clean-Out Challenge 2025
Step One: Go through and toss everything that should be tossed.
The obvious first step is to actually go through both freezers and toss stuff that’s no longer edible or that we’re never going to use. While I’m allowing myself to technically toss some stuff that I *could* use in theory, I’m trying to be honest with myself — if I’m unlikely to get to it during this month and it’s been in there for years, it needs to go.
Here’s just some of what I unearthed and trashed as I went through everything:
- raw almonds from 2018, which I not only moved from our last house, but that I clearly haven’t touched since
- more brown bananas than any family should respectably have in a freezer (we’re talking dozens)
- Random note: our favorite banana bread recipe (which is in this favorite gluten-free cookbook, which actually is part of a sale Amazon has right now for B1G150%) actually calls for FIVE bananas, so I could technically go through dozens in a semi-reasonable timeframe. However, many of the oldest bananas look seriously sketch, so I’m just chucking those ones to get rid of the ick factor and plan on keeping the rest
- most of a bag of mozzarella cheese (completely freezer burned…more frost than cheese, really, and the cheese was totally globbed together, too)
- several bags of gluten-free goods with just one small thing remaining (when will I learn that if I don’t use the heels fresh, I’m almost 100% sure to never use them at all?)
- partially eaten popsicles (thank you, dear children)
- homemade baked goods that had been long since forgotten (and that coincidentally, no one wants to eat anymore)
Part of the joy of decluttering and going through things like this is finding forgotten treasures, like all the ice packs we thought had just mysteriously disappeared (as we were using the same two over and over again and really skimping out on our ice pack needs anytime we had to pack a cooler), as well as about a million bag clips.
The declutter and trash session alone felt almost sufficient since it gave us back so much space, but because it also unearthed all sorts of things I’d forgotten about that really need to get used up, we go right on to step two of the process.
Step Two: Create a weekly plan for each section.
I’ve kind of divided the freezer into sections in my head, and my plan is that each week, I need to come up with ways to use up the oldest things in each section. This challenge very well might have to stretch into March just because of how much is in both freezers that needs to be used, but I at least want to get a solid head start this month.
I plan to do these weekly plans and reports back in separate posts of their own 🙂
Step Three: Chuck anything that was iffy at the end of the challenge if it still hasn’t been used up.
Because if I’ve given myself a deadline and I STILL don’t use it up, the data speaks for itself, and there’s no use in letting it take up valuable freezer real estate anymore.
