A Tour of My Storage Room

How do you roll with your food storage?  Do you keep all your items in one place?  Do you stash them around your house in spots where you can eek out room?  I’ll give you a tour of my prepper storage area, but first I want to cover a couple of items.

Where should you keep your preparedness items?

While not everyone has a whole room in which to keep their preparedness items, I would highly recommend if you have the ability to use a room that you do.  This room may not take the form that you are thinking though.

Basements are ideal because they keep a fairly steady temperature all year long and they tend to be cooler than the rest of the house – that’s a double plus for food storage.

But you may not have a basement.  In our first house in Ferguson, we had an old root cellar.  I could maybe keep some canned goods down there, but I certainly couldn’t keep anything that could be gotten into by critters.  I also couldn’t keep anything down there that was hard to carry because we had to stoop and walk incredibly stooped over for about ten feet before we could stand up – and then you might end up with spiders in your hair.  Needless to say, I avoided the dirt-floored root cellar like the plague.

Do you have more than three bedrooms?  I know parents oftentimes like their children to have their own bedrooms if you have more than two children, but if you don’t have a basement, it might be worth considering consolidating children so that you have a storage room.

Do you have an office, craft room, or guest room that you are unwilling to give completely over to your preparedness efforts?  You could start with just one wall or closet in that room.  Sometimes we feel like we have to have the perfect area for our food storage NOW.  Truth be told, we don’t.  Start where you are.  If you don’t have a dedicated area to keep your preparedness supplies, find one place that you can start.

Our Storage Room Story

I got started in food storage by accident.  I became a coupon extraordinaire (I’m not anymore).  At one point before couponing changed drastically, I was able to feed my family of six (at the time) and provide all their toiletries and paper goods for $200 a month, and we ate WELL.

We started small

So as I started gathering canned goods, I looked for a place to keep them.  It turned out what we had a lone cabinet in our garage.  So that’s where I started.  One double cabinet.  I put canned goods and some dry goods that wouldn’t go bad in either the cold or the hot in it.

Once I filled up that one cabinet (and it didn’t take long once I was really couponing), I decided that we had a wire shelf outside the door from our house out to our garage.  Toilet paper and cereal boxes went there.

But our stash kept growing

Soon I had an over abundance of toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss, mouthwash, shampoo, conditioner, and hairspray.  In the closet in our bedroom, we had two tiered wire shelves on which we hung clothes.  The upside was that the tiers were far enough apart that we could put these items into that space in our closet.

Until we had a dedicated storage room

Eventually, however, we outgrew all that space, and I wasn’t going down to the root cellar, so we had a choice to make.  We decided to consolidate some of our children into one room.  We used the freed up room for our storage room.

With our income tax return, we purchased shelving units, and put some food in buckets.  We bought a pressure canner and a Berkey water filter.

But what I want you to see is that this happened over the course of a year – and it only happened that fast because I was honestly an amazing couponer.  Unless you learn the ins-and-outs of the new way that couponing works really fast, it will probably take you longer to get to the point that you need a whole room to put your food storage and preparedness supplies.

Start where you are and be don’t get frustrated that your space isn’t perfect yet.  Let it grow with you.

My Storage Room Organization

In my storage room, I try to keep like items together.  I have a large shelf for pasta and another large shelf for drink items.  Toiletry items go together.  The same goes for spices, medical items, equipment etc.  I think you get the picture.

My storage room is organized into “pods” of a sort.  To make the most of the space, the first section is U-Shaped.

Pod 1

These two shelving units stand next to each other.  On the shelf on the left you’ll see kitty litter (for our portable toilet, baby wipes (in case we ever can’t take showers – at least we can be somewhat clean), our dehydrator, tortilla chips (a staple around here) toilet paper, and some more #10 cans.  On the shelving unit on the right, you’ll see canning supplies, some #10 cans, canned protein items like ham, spam, chicken, Pasta items, drink items.  This shelving unit is at a 90 degree angle to the first shelving unit above.  This unit that you are looking at is Thrive Life’s Variety Can System.  This fits three different sizes of cans from regular soup cans to what Thrive Life calls “Pantry cans” to #10 cans.

What is wonderful about this is it’s a FIFO or First-In First-Out system.  You put the can in the top part, and it rolls down to the bottom part.  You always take from the bottom, so you know you are always eating the oldest can of that kind first.

Each size can dictates how many of each you can fit.  Most of the soup cans you can fit about 14-15 per row, depending on how big the soup can.  You can fit 11 Pantry Cans (about a quart) per row, and you can fit 7 #10 cans per row.

Pod 2

These two shelving start our second “pod” or sorts.  We keep our black and yellow storage totes that I’ve gotten from Costco.  In several of these, I put four more smaller totes from the “Kits” series that I’ve been doing.  A couple of these have sleeping bags, and a couple of these keep other items together.

On the closest of the two units, you’ll see a lot of miscellaneous equipment.  These are things that I will be going through in the next couple of months so that I can clear out some space for other things which may be more necessary than some of those.  You’ll also see my two mop buckets there on the ground.  These are for “wringing’ out clothes if we have to wash them by hand.

And because I loved my other one so much, we purchased a second Thrive Life Variety Can System.  You’ll see some #10 cans sitting on the floor in front of certain rows.  These rows were full, so I just set the extras down in front.  You’ll see a couple of our buckets to the right of the system as well.  To the left of the variety can system, we have spices on top, paper goods, under that, medical totes, and then storage bags.

I purchased those clear plastic totes on the top through amazon, but they don’t fit into the larger black totes as well as the ones from Costco.  I learned the hard way that spices should be kept in plastic that is hard to gnaw through.  Mice seem to like spices and other items that I keep with it like my Trim Healthy Mama peanut butter powder.  If you keep things like that in hard plastic as opposed to the plastic bags that they come in, you are much more likely to keep rodents out.

Next to the tall shelf, we have a shorter one that is a bit more hodge podge.  We have some paper products on the top shelf and some personal care and cleaning products on the bottom three shelves.

This second “pod” looks more like a C than a U because we wanted to make the most of our space.  So next to this one we have two more shelving units.  Please keep in mind that we’ve accumulated this over the course of at least ten (if not more) years.  Setting yourself up for success takes time.

So this is at a ninety degree angle to the last shelving unit above.  This is my bottled water and condiment shelving unit.  For my family, I’ve decided that we’ll keep about a dozen of many condiments 4-6 of some other on hand at all times.  Instead of deciding that we’re having a meal that will require ketchup this week, I just shop from my storage room and replenish what we’ve used.  I do the same things when it comes to ketchup or mustard, or salad dressings, steak sauce, queso, peanut butter, honey, syrup.  And if anything drastic happens, then I have enough for awhile.

End Cap

This shelf is also more of a miscellaneous shelving unit.  We have plastic utensils, tealights, mosquito pray, light bulbs, Berkey water filters, waterbricks, terra cotta pots that we can use to make tealight heaters, Kleenex, Parmesan cheese, and more bottled water.

This shelving unit on the right is my second to last shelving unit.  This is again a smaller unit, and we use it to keep small bottled spices, our toiletries and the very bottom has cleaning supplies.

This is my last shelving unit.  You’ll see some more plastic totes of baking goods and spices on the very top.  You’ll also see larger bottles of bulk spies that I’ve purchased from Sam’s and Costco.  We also have dried fruits, and nuts, and fats on this unit.

What’s Missing?

Any guesses what’s missing?  At our last house we had water barrels that were filled and in our basement.  Here, we don’t have the space that we had there.  I have a plan though.  Whether it’s with this year’s income tax return or by some other means, I would like to get these water storage units.  They are called Hydrant Water Storage System.  I have a way that I could fit two of the three barrel systems in our basement.  Right now my water situation concerns me, but if I could get two of these, my family would have more than 45 days worth of water if we were using one gallon of water per day.

What about You?

First, do you have any questions about what you see in my storage room.  Second, would you like to share a picture of your storage room?  If you want to, you can e-mail your picture to me at Karen@ayearwithoutthegrocerystore.com.  Let me know if I can share it in my next weekly newsletter.

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