If you’re just beginning your backstock journey, I highly recommend taking an hour or so to find where everything on your list from part 1 is hiding.

For example, if you have 2 bathrooms then you might have bottles of shampoo in both the shower and the tub, under the sink and in a cabinet. Just for now, gather it all up and put it on the kitchen table or a counter to sort.

Just don’t, you know, move all the toilet paper out of the bathrooms. That would be cruel.

Maybe you do have cleaning stuff in the laundry room and under the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, oh yeah left in the bedroom after cleaning up a mess… putting everything in one location will let you see, in real time, what you actually have.

Then you can go down your list and make notes. Similar to the food organization strategy, you may want to decide how many of something you have and how many you want.

For example:

• Rubber gloves for cleaning: need 2, have 1
• Magic Erasers: need 2, have 13
• Shaving cream: need 2, have none

Do this before you do any shopping or else you’ll end up like my grandma with 12 bottles of mouthwash which I am still using up to this day.

If you live with other adults, consult them about items or brands they would like to keep stocked. This might lead to some compromise because you’d be fine with the 49 cent generic paper towels and they love Bounty, but that’s the nature of living with others. You might even want to expand your backstock list if there are similar items a few people need.

For example:

• Garnier Nutrisse shampoo & conditioner for curly hair (me)
• Head & Shoulders 2-in-1 (him)
• No Cry Baby Shampoo (kiddos)

If you just listed “shampoo” then you might stock up on the products you need while other family members run low. Again, adapt this to your family needs, if everyone uses the same products, great!

Now that you know how much you actually have, you can put everything back where it should go. But as you return items to the bathrooms or laundry room or closets, add on to your backstock list but noting where items live.

This is the fun part, you can just decide that extra toilet paper lives in the half bathroom or that wood cleaner and sponges go under the kitchen sink. Give these places a home and you may not even need a separate bin for your extra backstock.

I’ll wrap this up tomorrow with the final part, part 3, but for now you should have a detailed list of the non-perishable items your family uses regularly, how many you have on hand now, how many you want to have in stock and where these items live. If you’ve done that you’re in good shape!