No, this is not a picture of an episode of Hoarders.  This is what happens when you have heavy canning jars full of all sorts of goodies you have canned on a plastic shelf unit!  It’s actually a funny story that was a close call and could have been much worse.
The other morning after my kids went off to school and my hubby had gone back to bed (he’s subbing an early morning paper route for a friend) I hear this loud “BANG…….slide across the wall,  bang bang” (not in words but that’s how it sounded)  then a few seconds later I hear a couple more bangs.  Thinking it was the kids hitting the outside of the house or something I look out the window- but they were long gone to school.  Then I hear it again.  I thought maybe Scott (my hubby) was in the movie theater room moving things around or something so I go looking, nope.  I go upstairs to our bedroom and ask him if he heard any of it- which he hadn’t.  We wondered if someone was in our garage and if we had closed the door the night before.

So being the panicking wife, and Scott being the appeasing husband, he got up and checked the garage.  I thought maybe the shelves fell down or something?  But no. Everything was fine.  So he goes back to bed.

About 10 minutes later I hear glass jars moving around.  It only takes me a second to realize that the only place we have glass jars is in the basement food storage/hobby room.  Knowing that glass jars can’t move by themselves I scream for Scott to come downstairs and that I think someone is in the house!!  He runs down with a stick (guess the gun would have taken too long to grab)- but robbers beware lol.  I follow him downstairs with 911 ready to call on the cell phone.

We get to the hobby room to find that the shelf unit that holds all the glass jars of my canning stuff was collapsing!!  Luckily none of the glass jars that had already fallen off the shelves were broken. What a mess THAT would have been!!! Jam, pickled green beans, canned meat- not exactly fun stuff to clean up and out of carpet to boot.

So ignore the fact that the shelves are dusty, and the picture looks like one taken from the show hoarders (these were taken after we got the shelf to a manageable state where the at risk jars were removed).

It’s kind of hard to tell from these pictures- but what happened is the bottom 2 legs on one side have just given up and surrendered to gravity.

Moral of the story- use metal or thick wood shelves when storing heavy food storage! 🙂