Kitchen Tip: Organizing a Chest Freezer

I was sorting through my chest freezer yesterday and I had a brilliant idea. (at least I think it's brilliant ;-)) Having just received some of the cow my parents had bought from my uncle, I was trying to take an accurate inventory and get the "old" stuff on top of my freezer, so it would get used. I took everything out because DH and my dad had put all the new beef on top of the old food. As I returned everything to the freezer, I decided to write down what was on each level. I have now taped to the top of my freezer a "map" of sorts that tells me what layer to find which type of food on. Here's what it looks like:

Left Side:
Basket:
pepperoni, peppers, whole chicken, onion rings, cranberries, 2 lemonades, 2 stew beef
Under the basket:
Muffins, 12-1#hamburger packages
french fries, broccoli, corn
fish, 2 bags of 8-1Cup pkg rhubarb

Right Side:
crescent rolls, bread dough, green beans
2- 2# hamburger, 1 pork chop
Bagged together (pork chop, 3 sirloin steaks, 2 pork roasts), 1 gal. bucket of homemade ice cream
2 soup bones, 2 2.5#bags chicken
3 beef roasts, 2 pork spareribs
3 5# bags of white wheat

We just have a small chest freezer. The smallest they make actually because that's all we had space for, but DH is forever afraid of me "losing" food in it like our mothers do, and I have to admit, I'd forgotten about the bags of chicken and spare ribs. I'm hoping that this way, I won't forget the things that got buried last time. I know I also need to keep track of what I've taken out. That's the hard part.

This post is linked with Kitchen Tip Tuesday's at Tammy's Recipes . So be sure to head over to Tammy's Recipes to see what other kitchen short cuts others have shared.