Overland kitchen drawer loadout – what exactly is in there + NEVER lose a teaspoon again…
The purpose of a drawer loadout is essentially to clean and reorganise, this is particularly important in the back of an overland rig where every inch of space is at a premium.
A loadout involves removing all items, cleaning sorting and replacing, useful where food is involved [we all have some tins of something stuffed away right?] because it gives you the opportunity to check dates etc.
How often?
Usually around the spring is when we do our first loadout, it’s good to have some warmer weather so you can take your time [our warehouse is freezing in the winter] and get everything out and cleaned up etc. It’s also good knowing that you are starting fresh for the coming summer.
We also take out all of the drawers and have a damn good hoover twice over the summer, the Shogun is horrendous for sucking up dust through the rear hatch while driving and the interior build, even after one trip starts to gather a covering of dust, if you leave it, it gets unbearable especially when you’re cooking with hot oil or prepping food.
What’s involved?
An Overland kitchen drawer loadout needn’t be a chore but it does take some time depending on what you have in there! In the video above you can see that we had mainly food items, thinning down on such items or removing old stuff from last year is beneficial plus it gives you the chance to familiarise yourself with where everything is and pack it up so that there are no rattles.
Dust will probably be a big one so be prepared for that and if your rig is anything like ours [DIY plyboard drawers] you’ll also have a variety of stains, chips, wear and tear etc that could do with sorting out too.
Overall it’s a worthwhile exercise and worth spending some time over.
Making mods
Over time we noticed that there were a few things about our DIY drawer system that could be changed to make life that little bit easier. Most of it was organising the drawers themselves, where to put what etc. This time though we added another two dividers, nothing drastic just a couple of offcuts that would help keep loose items in their place.
First up was a 48cm length of plywood, not as high as the rest of the drawer partitions which was good plus it was fairly thin and robust. This simple length of wood was to separate the tea and coffee [plus other stuff in small containers] from the rest of the stuff in there which consisted mainly of cutlery.
Next was a small divider to isolate the cutlery even more and create a small area for the salt and sugar, then a metal fixing [don’t ask me what it is or what it’s used for] for the teaspoon that always goes missing.
As the smallest utensil in the draw it usually ends up at the bottom, hidden where you have to do an entire overland kitchen drawer loadout anyway just to make yourself a coffee.
No more… a simple solution to keep that teaspoon in full view at all times, it’s the most used utensil in there so it makes sense.
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