How Can I Store Food Storage In A Small Home?

Have you sometimes wondered “How can I store food storage in a small home?” Well, I have a fairly small home, it’s only 1900 square feet. I’m going to show you my home in small doses because otherwise, the post would take too long to load. I have a three-car garage, if you can call it a three-car garage with a narrow one-car section. You can barely fit two very small cars in the double garage and one car in the third stall. Mark and I use the third garage section for our emergency preparedness items that can withstand the heat in the summer. Everything else is stored inside my home. The temperatures here in Southern Utah can get up to 120 degrees in the summer, so all our food items we keep inside where the temperature is controlled. The ideal temperature for food storage would be 50-70 degrees. I can’t afford to keep the temperatures this low, so my food storage will not last the full 25 years (per some cans), just giving you the heads-up here.

Have you ever thought of owning a “tiny house?”

I love watching TV shows that talk about “Tiny Houses”.  If I didn’t have food storage or emergency preparedness items I could easily live in one of those. My husband, Mark, not so much, so here we stay because my passion is being prepared for the unexpected. I started taking pictures of some of my preparedness items and realized I will have to write two or three posts to show you how you can store food storage and emergency preparedness items.

I have received several emails asking me “Where do you store your food storage, Linda?” I’ve been asked to speak to a few groups in September, which is National Emergency Preparedness Month, so I decided to hire a professional photographer to take pictures of all my stuff as I pulled them out of the plastic protector bags. I can no longer haul all of my emergency preps or food storage to classes where I teach, so now I will bring pictures and make a slide show.

I’m going to start with my basic food storage items that I must have in order to make freshly ground whole wheat bread for Mark and me every two weeks or so. So my first must-have items are my wheat grinders. The one on the far left is by far the best electric wheat grinder I have ever used. This one is available at one of my favorite stores: Pleasant Hill Grain. The middle one I have used for years and is available at most stores. NutriMill Classic 760200 High Speed Grain Mill, 1200 Watt, 5 Cups Per Minute. The Red colored hand wheat grinder I purchased from a company in Montana. They are handmade and you can grind hard white wheat from coarse to fine whole wheat flour. It does many things with a lot of hand power. The Grain Maker-made in the USA

I Love Making Bread and Storing Wheat

Next, I’m sharing a picture of my Bosch bread mixer, I can’t keep my grocery bill down without making bread. Sometimes, Costco has them on display for a great price. Bosch MUM6N10UC Universal Plus Stand Mixer, 800 Watt, 6.5-Quarts with Dough Hook, Scraper and Double Beater  If you can learn to make bread, you can survive most any disaster. I used to make bread by hand with a huge silver bowl, I love making bread and teaching others how to make it.

Now, this is the hard white wheat that I store in my guest room next to the bedroom wall. Now, if I had children living at home, this wouldn’t work. The kids need room to play. But at least you can see how I store my wheat. It’s too hot to store wheat in my garage.

Shelving on Wheels is the Best!

I traded out my old Shelf Reliance rolling racks because I couldn’t see exactly what I had. It was driving me crazy. So I bought these shelves online at Costco. They are 72 inches tall by 18 inches deep and 48 inches wide. I bought the heavy-duty wheels that go with them and I use bungees to keep the canned goods secured to the shelves. I will show the old shelves I used to have below. They took up way too much room, and I like to see at a glance what I need to grab. If I had a basement with built-in shelves I would love it. But this house does not have a basement. So there you have it.

The picture below is my grandchildren’s guest bedroom lined with two sets of bunk beds. Under each bunk bed I have several cases of food storage stashed, neat and tidy!

These were my old shelves, which worked fine, but they took up too much room in the grandkids’ guest bedroom. We used to roll them out into our bedroom when we had guests, but that was getting tiresome so we switched them out. I like the new ones much better.

Take a walk around your house and see if you can stash some extra cans above the refrigerator, you know the cabinets we can’t reach. Do you have any shelves in your closets that could be used for some cases of food? What about the coffee table? Do you have side tables that are empty, fill them with a few cans of beans. If you have a hall closet with a shelf above it, add some cases there. What about under your beds? As I’m writing this, I’m starting to feel like a hoarder. I’m not a hoarder, just a chick that’s not going to stand in line at a grocery store for food or water after a disaster.

Would I love a basement or one whole room to store food storage, I sure would. But, I have a small home and we are making it work to store food storage, one can at a time. May God bless you for your efforts to prepare for the unexpected. We are going to need to be prepared, I promise.