Author of A Year Without the Grocery Store
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?” “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?” “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. Looking at each room with new eyes, 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 that food your family will refuse 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. 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 items 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 items 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 for food storage?
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.
Do you have some new ideas now?
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?
About the Author
On Good Friday in 2011, our house in Ferguson, Missouri was hit by an F4 tornado.
Many people write about food storage from their accumulating of food storage during easy times. They have a knowledge of it but haven’t had to really live it.
I haven’t written about food storage because of our abundance, but because we’ve had to live from our food storage out of necessity. We lived through that F-4 tornado that hit our house. While the tornado didn’t completely destroy our home, we were displaced by it. Having food storage in our house allowed me to literally pack up three week’s worth of food and take it to the hotel in which the insurance company was putting us up. I didn’t have to think about food or menus or about money to eat out every meal. This knowledge gave me the freedom to focus on getting things settled with the insurance company. I had the freedom to keep my kids going and to deal with them not feeling safe. I had the freedom to run to different places to sign documents or make the different phone calls to deal with the devastation the storm wreaked on our home.
Since that time, I’ve lived through two other life-changing events. I was an eyewitness to the Ferguson riots. No matter which side of the equation you come down on, it was life-changing and eye-opening. I also lived through an armed standoff with a knife-wielding man during my family’s time at a local homeschool chess club. These taught me the importance of knowing how to react before something happens, so you get it right. You don’t have time to think things over. Each of these things taught me a new level of self-sufficiency and preparedness.
I never knew what life was going to throw at me, but my journey to self-sufficiency started with food storage and grew beyond my wildest imaginings.
Find out more about Karen Morris:
Her book: A Year Without the Grocery Store
Her website: AYearWithouttheGroceryStore.com
Ms Morris recommends, as one way to find additional storage space, keeping jars of home-canned food “out in the open.” This is not a good idea, as light degrades the nutrients in food, as well as its color.
See the National Center for Home Food Preservation (a joint venture by the USDA and University of Georgia) and, more specifically:
http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/store/store_home_canned.html
I’ve seen this error multiple times recently and I do not know why. Otherwise, I think it’s a good article. My husband and I live in a very small house. We used to live in an even-smaller house – 540 square feet, no cellar.
I’m going through books in a bookcase today, and many will be set aside for a friend. Cans of freeze-dried food will take their place. The front of the bookcase is covered with a pretty sheet which matches our bedroom curtains. Quite a bit of new storage!
http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/store/store_home_canned.html
Pat,
Thanks for the comment! I appreciate the feedback. When I was talking about putting food in canning jars, I was talking about dried food – not pressure canned food. While the nutrients may still degrade, my thought is some nutrients out in the open is better than no nutrients because I didn’t have enough space to store it in hidden places. I totally understand where you are coming from wanting the most nutrient dense food though. That is definitely the best option if you have room for it!
Hi Karen, Sorry, it applies to dried food too. All kinds of food. However, you are absolutely right that some nutrients out in the open are better than no nutrients at at all.
But you know, really, I think everyone can find *some* place in their home where food isn’t exposed to light. Under a bed, for example. I don’t have to do this, thank goodness, because it makes cleaning under the bed more difficult, but I would – for sure – do it if I needed to.
Pat
I love books so much I can’t get rid of them! And in fact, they are part of our “prep”. But, if your shelves are deep enough, and you don’t have as many books as we do 🙂 you can store things *behind* them.
That wads a great article on finding more space for food & stuff. You forgot a REALLY good one.
Get some lumber and build a “LOFT” over the beds, and use it for storage, or build a “loft” and put the bed up there and put desks, dressers and storage UNDER the “bed loft”!
How many hippies and college students used to build lofts in the bedroom and re-organized everything? Most houses have 8ft ceilings (some are higher) and all that space is never used.
Of course, it’s never a good idea to store food in WARMER places, so if your ceiling space is too warm for good food storage, then store the things up there that are NOT food, and use the freed-up space (lower down) for the food.
Another trick, is to make a “false-raised floor”, so you’ve got 10-12″ of space under it. I’m sure there’s at least ONE room that you won’t mind “stepping up ONE step higher” to get into the room.
I love the idea of the canning jars! I’m embarrassed that I never thought of that considering I actually have a shelf in a kitchen cabinet with glass doors where I have about a dozen empty canning jars sitting THIS MINUTE. Haha. I’m not only inspired to store some food preps in plain sight, but I’m inspired to make that look purposeful and not like I just ran out of places to put stuff (which is what happened). 🙂
You can put up a shelf about a foot from the ceiling in your bathrooms just higher than the door. Then you can put shampoo, soap, any other thing you want up on the shelf. Large 5 gallon buckets can be made into seating around your table. Just put a round of plywood on them and pad and cover it.
Remember if you have heat in your bedroom floors that some items can’t be stored under your beds. paper products or such is ok. Foods really shouldn’t be put under beds because they will stay warm and that takes away from the old cool, dark and other hints to lengthen their life.
Karen’s excellent article (and most of the comments) were created a couple of years ago before some current day calamities were even conceivable. Most people had no idea that a virus (seemingly out of nowhere) could be used by those in power to lockdown much of the US economy — and kill some 10x more people than the virus ever could.
Few people could envision their houses being stolen from them by predatory cities and states over outrageously high code enforcement fines or even shortages on property taxes that were never communicated to the owner. Today there are articles about some 50% of American families in fear of going bankrupt over surprise gotcha expensive medical bills (the highest in the world now).
Who could have forecast that the medical cartel (with a federal legal exemption since 1986 from liability for killing or injuring for life a recipient of their insufficiently tested but patented and skyhigh priced vaccines) would be poised to profit from a “possibly” MANDATORY Covid-19 vaccine which can’t possibly be safety tested, given the 5-10 years it would take to assure safety and efficacy?
Who could have forecast that hundreds of major US corporations would be funding rioters in city after major city throughout the country? Such riots damage to businesses and houses may not even be insurable if the policy has an exemption for “civil disturbances.”
All these issues are potential causes for being forced to leave one’s house where the concept of the INCH bag (a version of bug out bag that means “I’m Never Coming Home”) arrives brutally in your face. So what does this long rant about risks have to do with Karen’s food storage article theme?
1. The weight and volume that food storage requires can take on new meaning if one should be forced to move, or even going vehicle nomadic for years to come. Even if no move is required, the difference between canned foods and dehydrated foods is significant. Tammy Gangloff, the guiding light behind
https://www.dehydrate2store.com/
makes it clear that home canned foods retain about 50% of their pre-canned nutrition. In contrast, she says that dehydrated foods (at least the percentage that CAN be dehydrated successfully) retain about 90% of their pre-processed nutrition. Putting the combination of higher nutrition AND much less weight AND storage volume together, there is a strong argument for opting for dehydrated food storage as much as possible. That argument holds whether one is cramped for food storage at home, really cramped for space as a mobile nomad for years to come, or even as a last minute expat who can’t afford to ship most of what s/he owns to a replacement country to live in where medical expenses are reasonably affordable, where naturopathic medical skills are not outlawed, and where defective vaccines are not a threat to one’s health, DNA and future generations.
2. Up until a couple of generations ago, most rural properties still had traditional root cellars that doubled as emergency tornado cellars as well. Then as the population moved into cities, or as cities grew to absorb former rural properties, the property developers dug out and destroyed those root cellars as fast as they could. As a result, lots of houses today don’t have the food storage space the ancestral generations had. So what to do?
People have tried several solutions. The most well known are buried shipping cargo containers, which have problems with collapsing if they are not well-reinforced. Some people have tried burying old school buses. Hiring a contractor to install a traditional concrete cellar can be very expensive. Then a few years ago, a guy named Tom Griffith learned of a Vietnam vet who, at age 70, with only one leg, had used some Viet Cong underground building techniques to cheaply do where most other methods fell short. Together they created an information how-to package called the Easy Cellar, which is described in these links:
Reviewed here:
https://healthreviewfactory.com/easy-cellar-review/
Presentation website:
https://www.easy-cellar.com/vsl/index.php?
plus
Easy Cellar Review (2020) – ⚠️ What They Are Not Telling You…
in this 7:42 minute video, from Delyt Health on 9 Apr 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX_D_p6SX40
It appears to me that once you learn how to do it, on the cheap, you could build it in your own backyard. Even if you had to leave home in the future on an INCH basis, you could always reproduce such storage once you acquire a replacement long term living site again — in which case Karen’s insights into food storage how-to become again quite useful.
–Lewis
If you have a house that still has rooms in the downstairs, get rid of the dining room. It’s the most underused room in the house. Plus, it’s usually very close to the kitchen. Put in shelving library-style to maximize the space. For shelving on an outside wall which may get too hot or too cold for food, place small appliances or decorative items. This will clear out space in the kitchen cabinets and declutter the counters. You can also leave floor space for stacking beverage containers. Adding a small table will give space for organizing things and a small cart will help move items around, as needed.