One of the funnier scenes in The R.M. (an LDS comedy movie) is when the main character, a newly returned missionary, first goes to use his bed in his old bedroom at his parents' house. As he lays down on the bed, he hears a bunch of crinkling. Lifting up the bed spread, he discovers that his parents have replaced his mattress with packages of stored food as part of their year supply.
I think that one of the most difficult parts of storing food and water is simply finding a place to store the food. There is a family in our ward that has a basement storage room set up like a supermarket, with neatly organized shelves, a small shopping cart, and a clipboard to note down everything they take out of storage as they use it so they can then replace it in the future. But not all of us live in a 5,000 square foot house. Storage issues can be particularly acute if you live in an apartment (as my wife and I did for many years) or in a house without a basement (as we currently do).
Another member of our ward installed an ingenious system in his interior walls. He removed interior paneling, installed shelves, and then reinstalled the paneling with slots wide enough to place and extract canned food from the spaces. I've also known people that have used the storage cans and buckets to provide a "base" for a "table," and then put a piece of plywood or whatever over the top, covered it all with a table cloth. If you are good at woodworking, there are shelves and canned foot storage units that you can make to maximize your space.
We have a large coat closet that we turned over to food storage, and part of our linen closet that we use, our pantry (of course) and then have 5 gallon buckets stored at different locations around the house, in corners and behind cupboards. (We used another closet as well, but when my daughter got married earlier this year, we emptied it out and sent the food with her so she and her husband could get a jump start on food storage). I don't feel comfortable storing food stuffs in our garage because of the temperature extremes, particularly in the summer when temperatures can easily get up to 100 degrees or more, although I do keep drums of water out there.
Skean Dhude, at UK Survival has also some thoughts on maximizing storage space that are worth reading.
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Another option to consider for storing food and other supplies is to just accept the fact that some of the rooms in your home will have a slight warehouse feel to them. Certainly, don't forget OPSEC considerations, but that doesn't mean you can't have a stack of supplies along a wall in a bedroom.
ReplyDeleteFor example, much of my stored potable water is cases of half-liter bottled water - nearly 30 cases. Like every other food storage item, it needs to be rotated. With my bottled water this means having to restack the water with the freshest water at the bottom. By stacking it along the wall of a bedroom, there is plenty of workspace available when rotating/restacking is required - it wouldn't happen if this water was buried in the back of a closet. I stack additional lighter food storage items on top of the water, reaching the ceiling.
Further, to dramatically improve the stability of this shoulder-high stack of water, I have cut pieces of corrugated cardboard salvaged from old boxes that are the width and depth of a row of cases of bottled water, and place those cardboard pieces between every row or couple of rows. It doesn't matter if there are folds in the cardboard, so long as it is a single contiguous piece of cardboard. I prefer to glue or tape together two layers of cardboard to improve stiffness, but that is unnecessary. The cardboard ties the stack together.
My wife and I attended a presentation put on the local emergency management agency. The gentleman giving the presentation actually recommended the drinking water bottles, such as you have, for water storage--over large barrels--because it was easier to grab several cases to throw in your car in the event of an evacuation and it is more sanitary than reusing containers (such as the 5 gallon jugs frequently used for camping).
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