Organizing My Food Supply

As you may have heard or noticed at the grocery store, the price of food is rising and it isn’t predicted to go back down any time soon. I decided it was finally time to take food storage seriously. Yes, my mother is the queen of this kind of emergency prep stuff, and I was still way behind. I blame it partly on moving around so often that I never wanted to get too much knowing that I would just have to move it all again.

I was trying to think of a place to store the food, because the garage gets pretty hot in the summer and my kitchen cabinet space is adequate for our family of six, but not to try to stuff in any extras. So of course I was discussing this with my mom on one of her visits here. We were sitting in the office at the time and she looked at the open closet that looked like this:

She suggested I move the storage boxes into the garage and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that. So one day I took everything out, and looked in every box to make sure it was okay to store in the garage. There were some photo albums that I moved to my bedroom closet upstairs and a few things that I found I really wanted out where I could use them, not lost in the cardboard boxes. I then went to Sams Club and bought some cool shelves with bins, and then to Lowes to get a cabinet with doors for the garage. So now the office closet looks like this:

and the garage looks like this:

I’m working on getting paper products and nonperishables like soap, diapers, etc on these shelves. I also have our 72 hour kits on the top shelves so if we need to leave our home quickly we can grab and go.

It feels good to know that if the truckers go on strike or the inevitable big earthquake hits, my family will stay fed and clean, (even if we are living off of pasta and PB&J)… At least for a few weeks. I’m working my way up to three months eventually.

5 Comments

  1. Mel
    May 15, 2008

    Wow. No really, wow, you are so organized…and prepared. I didn’t know that food prices were rising. Good to know.

  2. Marea
    May 15, 2008

    That’s is amazing! Can you come to my house?! LOL Seriously, it looks great!

  3. nana
    May 15, 2008

    Yipee! Looks great. I’m almost finished with my calculator and will let you know when it is done so you can figure exactly how much of everything you need for 3 months. Keep up the good work!

  4. Heidi
    May 15, 2008

    I feel like we I can’t work on my food storage until our house rennovations are closer to done. There is no place to put the things we already have. Great job Amy!

  5. Stephanie
    May 16, 2008

    Wow – this looks GREAT. I too struggle on finding places to store stuff. Maybe I’ll clean out the 2nd bedroom closet and get some stuff in there. I am slowly (emphasize slowly) working on building a one-year supply.

    This motivates me. Thanks for sharing!