7 Questions to Help You Figure Out Where to Store All That Food

This article is a reprint of an article that I wrote for Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper.

About twelve years ago, my family decided to start storing food in case one of those dreaded “what ifs” happened in our lives.

You know those “what ifs.”

“What if we lose a source of income?”  Then there’s the: “What if someone is injured and can no longer work?” “What if we are sued and don’t have enough money to cover the lawsuit?”  And there’s this one:  “What if prices go up so much that we can’t afford to feed our family as well as we do now?”

Yeah. Even if your “what ifs” aren’t the same as mine, I’d be willing to bet you have your own.

So those “what ifs” drove us to start amassing food. But one of the first things that went through my mind was, “We don’t have a basement! Where are we going to store food?”

Has that thought ever crossed your mind? If you’re in a bit of a panic because you don’t know where you’re going to store your stash, I’m going to provide you with seven questions that will help you uncover not-before-thought-of-spots.

I want you to take a walk through your house, one room at a time. Look at each room with new eyes and ask yourself these seven questions.

#1) Do I have anything that I can get rid of to create more room for food storage?

Well, the first and most obvious place to store food is in your kitchen. Go through your cabinets. Do you have approximately a gazillion plastic lids, but they don’t match any of your containers? Get rid of the lids and reclaim that area for food storage. Has your one gadget drawer procreated, so now you have three billowing gadget drawers? Purge the items you’ve never used and are never likely to use in an emergency. Then use that space for food storage.

Do you have half a dozen cans of asparagus sitting in your pantry that your family will never eat? You probably got them on sale and you feel guilty for throwing them away, right? (GUILTY HERE!)  If you don’t want to feel guilty, donate them to a local food pantry – but get rid of the food that your family refuses to eat and use that space for foods that they will eat.

But purging items, even if you’re doing this in each room, will only get you so far. So, the next questions deal with places to store your stash.

#2) Can I put my food storage UNDER something? 

One of the most underutilized spaces (pun intended) is under beds! There are totes that are specifically made on rollers to slide easily under beds. This is a great place to store some of your food. And the more people you have crammed into your house, the more beds you have to put food under!

If you want to put taller items under beds, you can purchase bed risers to raise your beds off of the ground another 4-8” so the items fit under there.

A word of caution. Don’t put items underneath beds that can easily be compressed and/or break. At one point we decided to store gallons of water in shallow totes under our bed on risers. We had a good 3-4 inches of clearance between the bed and the tops of the gallons of water, but we hadn’t counted on our kids either plopping hard or repeatedly or outright jumping on our bed. We lost several gallons of water that way. Fortunately, they were at least in a tote so we didn’t soak the carpet.

While it might not work to put water under a bed, we have completely gotten rid of a box spring and used some of our five-gallon buckets in its place. Depending on whether you have round containers, rectangular, or both, you can fit anywhere from fifteen to twenty buckets under a bed. Buy an extra long dust ruffle for the bed and put a mattress on top of the buckets. No one will ever know your bed is made out of food storage!

Do you have couches that are high enough that items could be stored under them in shallow totes?

We have a table that has two shelves under it, so we currently keep gallons of water on those shelves. We learned our lesson with water under the bed.

#3) Can I store items IN something?

I’ve seen ottomans which are hollow. The lid removes so you can place things into the ottoman, but no one would ever know it’s there if they didn’t realize what kind of ottoman it was.

There are coffee tables which are similar. You can store items in the coffee table if need be. I’ve even seen old travel trunks used as coffee tables. Look for them at garage sales and estate sales, and use them to store food.

We’ve even taken to putting bookcases into many of our closets in order to provide extra storage there. We also put some of those plastic sets of drawers in the sides of our closet that aren’t easy to access. This lets us use an awkward space in such a way that it’s easily accessible. That’s a double win!

#4) Can I store food OUT IN THE OPEN? 

We keep our oil lamps displayed throughout the living spaces of our house. They are beautiful, decorative, and functional.

We have candles in glass containers in each of our bathrooms. They look decorative, but if the power goes out, we need to be able to see since many of our bathrooms don’t have windows. You’d never know that those pretty candles were placed there for a reason other than aesthetics.

Do you have extra blankets? Are they decorative enough for you to drape over the back of a chair? If so, you’ve found your ‘storage’ location.

I know of a blogger who gushes about how she loves her canning jars in all their amazing shapes and sizes. What about keeping quart or half-gallon jars filled with colorful dried beans or dried corn out in the open? If you use new lids and put an oxygen absorber in the top of them, they are truly long-term food storage. They look decorative, and you’re storing items out in the open at the same time.

#5) Can I store items BEHIND something?

In two rooms of our house, we have chairs that sit at an angle to the wall in a corner of a given room. Those are great places to store things where people would never look.

Do you have a couch that you could pull eight inches to a foot away from the wall and put a couch-height table with shelves behind it? If it has shelves, you can use those shelves – and with your couch up against the table, no one would be the wiser. They would just think you’ve put so much thought into your house that you put a shelf behind your couch so that people have a place to put their warm mugs of coffee within arm’s reach.

#6) Can I store food in rooms I’ve not used before?

Is there a room in your house that could be called a bedroom that is not currently being occupied as a bedroom?  This might be called the office, the guest room, the exercise room, or the media room. Whatever room that is, could you sacrifice it to store your preparedness items there?

What about something even more unthinkable than that? What about asking children to share a bedroom so that you use one of the rooms to store your items in? In our house, we consolidated two of our girls into one room. One thanked us because she loves sharing her room with her sister. The other thanked us because we were making sure that if something happened she would be taken care of. Not all children would be that easy-going about it, but consider it as an option.

But let’s say you can’t give up a whole room. What about the closet of a room or a wall of the room? You can put shelving units in either place to store items and this way you aren’t giving up an entire room.

#7) Can I move items to a new space and take over that space to store food?

A great example of this is your linen closet. Could you hang a hook on the back of each person’s bedroom door and put their own personal towel on the back of their door? Or, have each person store their towel and a few washcloths in their closet. Then when the linen closet is free, use it for food storage.

What About You?

Finding a place to put your food storage when you don’t have a basement could seem like an insurmountable hurdle, but it’s really doable.

What unusual places have you found to stash your food?

Together let’s Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome

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