Today I’m following up with my ideas on how to store emergency preparedness items. I have a small home, as I have mentioned before. It’s 1900 square feet, and you may remember, I have a three-car garage. The third stall, which could hardly fit any size car, is where Mark and I organized all our emergency preparedness items.
All my food storage remains inside the house. I only store emergency preparedness stuff that can withstand the heat here in Southern Utah in the summer. Outside temperatures have gotten as high as 120 degrees, making the temperature in the garage, even with all the insulation we have added, higher than food storage items can stand for any length of time.
Yep, it’s hot here in the summer! We have a lot of dust here, so you see that almost all of my stuff has been put in protective plastic zippered bags.
I hope this post shows the world several different options to store emergency preparedness items. I apologize for the different size pictures, but I wanted you to see as much as possible on each rack.
How To Store Emergency Preparedness Items
I have hanging shelves from my garage ceilings (I have seen the shelves at Costco). They are 4 feet by 8 feet and about 18-24 inches hanging from the ceiling. The portable washing machines are two 6-gallon buckets (one has drilled holes in it), a green Gamma lid and a mobile washer like this one: Breathing Mobile Washer Classic – Portable Clothes Washing Machine – Handheld – Manual – Mobile Hand Powered Laundry Solution – Superior Materials and Construction
The large wash buckets can be found at most stores, these are made by Behrens. Behrens 2, 15-Gallon Round Steel Tub
I went to an antique store to get a washboard. Bwbg7 Galvanized Washboard (Wbg7)
I bought some heavy-duty racks from Costco online and they deliver them to your house. They are 72 inches tall by 48 inches wide and 18 inches deep. They have some heavy-duty rolling wheels which are nice when I need to move them. The clear bags above are 33-gallon garbage clear bags from Costco.
I label everything with cardstock and place the 1/2 sheets in the buckets so I know what I have in each one. My 72-hour kits below are in plastic bags with a list of items that are in each one.
I have a very small kitchen, so I store my pressure canner and water bath canner outside in those bags as well. These are the bags that I buy, depending on the size of the item I’m storing: Richards Homewares – Set of 4 Md Chests 12 Guage Vinyl 12x16x8 each, Kitchen
You can buy these at Bed Bath and Beyond as well.
All of my Lodge Dutch ovens and cast iron pieces have Lodge bags, if available, and then they are stored in the appropriate size bags to keep them dust free. Set of 2 Clear Zippered Sweater Storage Bags
The buckets below are color-coded for a reason. I can see at a glance how much FUEL I have. I have the regular propane tanks out on the back patio stored away from the house. I buy these colored buckets and Gamma lids from Pleasant Hill Grain: Gamma Lids(all different colors) and the 5-gallon colored buckets. Any bucket with a lid will work, I’m just an organized chick, it’s who I am.
- Green-clean scrap wood
- Red-oak lump charcoal
- Black-clean pine cones
- Blue-Kingsford’scharcoal briquettes without the starter fluid
Final Word
Now, that I have shared some of my ideas on how to store emergency preparedness items I hope it helps you get motivated to be prepared even more. We don’t all have an extra garage space to store items, I get it. We need to learn to be creative about storing things using limited space. I had never thought about hanging shelving from the ceiling in the garage. Hopefully, you have some closets with unused space, even if it’s a small area. As I’ve mentioned before, I have some BlueCans (water) in cases behind an entertainment center in my master bedroom. Get those creative juices flowing, you’ll figure out some new places to put the things you need. May God bless us all when an unforeseen disaster strikes our community. We will be ready, that’s for sure.
