The Prepared & Organized Vehicle – Putting it All Together with Simplicity and Style

Do you ever feel “frumpy?”  Do you know what I mean?  You get up, you; throw on an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt.  You’re clothed, but you don’t feel classy.  You just kind of feel frumpy.  A vehicle can be the same way.    I wouldn’t necessarily call a car frumpy, but is your vehicle just a hodge-podge of stuff? The items you have in your vehicle might have a purpose, but that purpose isn’t at all clear?  And more than that, your stuff looks disorganized and ,because of that, it FEELS disorganized.  And the worst part is that you’re easily frustrated because you can’t find what you want to at a moment’s notice?

Have you missed the first few articles in this series?   You can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.  And today, we’ll put it all together with simplicity and style.

***There are links in this post.  Some of the links may be affiliate links.  I promise you that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality items to serve you. All of these are the items that I have bought for my own family.  If you click on a link, your price will remain the same.  If you make a purchase, we may earn a small commission that aids in the cost of the running of this website.***

The Organized Vehicle!

Well, with a little effort, some elbow grease, and if you want to, a couple of small purchases, you can make sure that even in your car, there is a place for everything, and everything can be in its place.  You can KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt where your preparedness items are (assuming kids haven’t swiped them).

The Trunk

While this may not hold true for a car – where the trunk is hidden from view, but with any van I’ve owned, if the trunk doesn’t feel organized, then none of the van feels organized.  So let’s start with the trunk.

Now, since last year, for the first time in like fourteen or fifteen years a van is no longer our main family vehicle.  Right now, we have a Honda CRV that we drive everywhere that we can.  The problem is that it doesn’t fit the entire family, so we do still have a van for trips.

I was fortunately with our CRV, we have a shelf in the trunk!

This shelf has a dual purpose.  It allows me to keep all of our preparedness items organized and out of the way – even when I’m grocery shopping!  Win-Win!  It also gives me storage space to cart around things that I want to – or to purchase slightly bigger items.  Even today I was out with my mom and she found a blanket ladder that she loved.  We were able to fit it into the CRV without an issue and part of that reason is the shelf!

So I’m going to walk you through what we keep in the back of our CRV (and transfer to our van for long trips) because there is a bit more here than meets the eye.

On the inside rung of the back row of headrests, you should see two very heavy duty plastic hooks.  I LOVE these hooks.  Don’t let the fact that they are plastic deter you from them.  These are heavy duty.  If I can carry a bag and actually hang it on the hook, this hook will hold it!  It is STRONG!  While I have the shelf, these hooks keep my bags from falling into the space between the back seat and the shelf.  If I could only buy one thing again that I mention in this article, it would be these.  That’s how much I love them.

Under the shelf

Under the shelf, I have Preparedness Totes.  They measure approximately 18″ long by 9″ wide and 7″ high.  I purchased these at Costco, but they don’t have them in their online store.  These are the ones that I could find that were closest to what I have.  Each tote has a different grouping of items.  In the front row I’m going to work from left to right.  First, we have first aid tote (which I unfortunately used a great deal on our trip to Florida several weeks ago).  Second, we have our water tote.  This is where I keep our portable water filter, our water bladder, and our two canteens.  Last, in the front row on the right, I have our cooking tote.  This is where I keep our portable stove, our MalloMe cooking kit, and our dishes to eat out of.

In the front row, but not in totes, on the left, we have a roll of paper towels and several black trash bags.  We will sometimes use these trash bags as dirty clothes bags when we travel.  In a pinch, you can cut a hole in the top and two on the sides and you have a makeshift poncho.  They can be used to contain things or to keep backpacks dry.  Think outside the box.  You can cut these up and if your tarp or tent has a small hole, you can use these for a temporary patch.  Just so many uses that most times we overlook.

Our Backpack

On the right side of the front row, you’ll see a backpack.  Our backpack was born out of our Ferguson Tornado incident.  I won’t go into detail about it here, but if you want to read more about it, you can find it on my about page .   Suffice it to say, that we were unable to get into our home the night the tornado hit.  We stayed overnight at a friend’s house, but we didn’t have any toiletries, toothbrushes, or even clean undergarments.  This backpack holds all of those items along with our ponchos and some extra fire starting equipment.

The Back Row

In the back row underneath our shelf, the tote on the left is car car equipment.  So I have to tell you about a new thing that I just purchased on the recommendation of one of my readers.  Have you heard of a Halo Bolt  Air?  I hadn’t either, but get this.  It’s a small device.  It only measures about 10″ long by 5″ wide and 2″ tall.  This little box can jump your car!  It can also pump up a flat tire on your car or a bike tire or your basketball or even an air mattress.  It can charge your cell phone and many computers.  It also has a floodlight feature.  This is one of the pieces of equipment that I keep in the tote on the back left of our vehicle.

Besides the Halo Bolt Air, we also have Fix-A-Flat, a small bottle of windshield washer fluid, a headlamp and another flashlight, and a gas siphon.

In the tote to the right of it, we have ‘roughing it’ items.  We have ways to start fire.  We also have dry bags.  Have you ever heard of those before?  These are bags made out of parachute material and if you seal them properly – anything that you keep inside of them will stay dry.   We have two different types that we’ve purchased.  We have this set of three dry bags which are 2 liter, 4 liter, and 8 liter respectively.  But what if you need to keep something bigger dry?  We also have this set of two dry bags which are 10 liter and 15 liter.  We also have foot and hand warmers, mylar blankets, various types of cordage and carbineer clips.

To the right of that, we have a case of water.  Yes, I am well aware that water bottles left in a car can have carcinogens in them.  This is my deal though.  This case of water is for emergencies – not for every day or even occasional use.  If we get stranded, I am not going to care that two water bottles that I’m drinking might have a miniscule amount of carcinogens in them.  Most foods at the grocery store that have been sprayed with pesticides have more carcinogens than drinking two or three water bottles once or at a max twice in my life.  I’ll step off of my soap box now.🤔

And I found emoji’s for my blog posts now!🎉  But I digress.

What you don’t see to the right of the case of water is a tent.  Yes, we keep a four season, six person tent in our vehicle.

On the top of the shelf that’s folded back, you’ll also see a tarp and our overflow food bag.  What I had wouldn’t all fix in our console between the two seats in the front.

Seat Back Organizer – Organized

This is one of the two best investments we’ve made in equipment for our van.  I ordered three of these, and they are WONDERFUL!  On the top left, I keep glow sticks.  If our vehicle dies on the side of the road after dark, we can place these around it to let people know that we are there.  Also, if the same thing happens and your children are littler, having one of these in their hands can actually bring them a great deal of comfort.

In the middle we keep baby wipes.  I don’t have children in diapers any more, but besides cleaning up messes, these are amazing at taking stains out of clothes!  I did something stupid and wore a pair of white capris on our vacation and not once – but TWICE – I got something on one of the legs.  These babies (Ha!  Pun so intended) came to my rescue and removed the stains quickly.

On the top right, we have an easy to grab flashlight.  It’s there because I can grab it from the driver’s seat if I needed to.

On the bottom of the organizer we keep various bags – black trash bags, white trash bags (wrapped in the black ones) and gallon sized and quart sized zippered bags.  We used to carry the zippered bags mostly for our children who would get car sick when we travelled.  We rarely have to worry about that any more, but we use these for other purposes now.  If we want to split a bag of chips or M&Ms we can use those bags.  If we’re at the beach and we want to gather seashells, these bags perform admirably and everyone can have one if they’d like.

Behind the zippered bags, what you don’t see if our fire extinguisher.

Then in the middle of the we keep our sunscreen and my homemade bug spray.

This is Now – But What About Then?

So this is what works for me now.  And it works well, but we used to use some other items that I want to tell you about because they may serve you really well.  Before the CRV, my most useful item (that we still keep in the van that we have) is our trunk organizer.

Underneath the seat back organizer, I keep a trunk organizer.  This ranks right up there with the seat back organizer in wonderful investments.  When it’s open, it measures close to 24″x12″.  It may not sound like a lot, but we kept ours chock-full.  We kept space blankets, a first aid kit, our “MalloMe” camping cooking set,  portable outdoor camp stove, work gloves, cordage, sore throat lozenges, an extra knife, matches, two picnic table covers, a blanket, paper plates and plastic silverware, and a tarp.  And even with  all those items in there, it doesn’t look cluttered.  I loved the outer pockets where I kept smaller items – fire starters, two decks of cards, carbineer clips, a knife, etc.

It Wasn’t Always This Organized

Our last car was a Honda Odessey, and while it had more ‘hiding places,’ the items we kept in the vehicle weren’t nearly as well organized as they are here.  If you find yourself in the same situation and you’re stashing items under seats (we did this with the Odessey), and in random nooks in the front of your car, and other things are on the back of seats in organizers or even in the mesh or vinyl compartments that stretch across most driver’s and passenger’s seatbacks, you can still know quickly beyond a shadow of a doubt where you put each and every item.

Enter Cozi

I have a free family organizer app called Cozi.  One of the features Cozi has is called “Lists.”  Usually, people use this feature for grocery lists.  I do too, but I also use this feature to keep track of where my items are in my car.  Under the lists feature, I create a car list that says, “Front of the Van.”  This allows me to even make subheadings such as, “Top Glove Compartment,” or “Bottom glove compartment.”  I had a second list that said, “Middle of the Van.”  In this list, I would include under the front seats (since they were accessed from behind).  In the Honda, we had a hidden compartment in the middle of the floor.  I would list that we well.  Then I had another list of “Trunk of the Van.”

Everything that went into the van was listed on my app.  I would know exactly where the first aid kit was if I needed it, but hadn’t used it for two years!  I knew where my headlamp was because it was listed on my app.  If you don’t have Cozi (it’s free) and you don’t want Cozi, you can still create a document on your smartphone or even a low tech list that you tape to the inside of your glove compartment.

What About You?

How do you organize your vehicle?  Are there must-have items that aren’t listed here?  Are there things that I’ve included that you hadn’t considered or would never keep in your vehicle?  I’d love to hear from you!  Leave a comment below so that we can all be better prepared.  And never forget . . .

You’ve Got This, Mama!