Food Storage Tips – Hack Your Coat Closet – Part 2

After coming up with lots of good reasons keep a small amount of emergency supplies (PART 1) lets talk about where to keep them.  There are lots of good places to store food, water, and other supplies in places you might not have thought of.   Under the bed, in your clothes closet, in the garage, or just in a spare room all make sense.

I live in a small house with my wife and 4 children and we really didn’t have much room for more storage.  We’ve been keeping food in the garage for awhile but it’s never been a great place because of the wide fluctuations in temperature.  Even canned and packaged food shouldn’t be subjected to high heat for long term storage.  So, we decided our coat closet would be the perfect place.  We all have plenty of room in our own closets for the coats so it’s just a slight inconvenience not having them by the door.

We thought about installing some more shelves in the coat closet but I’m sure we’ll be moving sometime in the next 5 years so I didn’t want to have to take them down. We found a simple, stand alone, plastic shelf that is meant for your garage.  Presto, instant storage room.  It fit nicely in the closet except for the top part. No worries, my kids are using it in the playroom as a table for their stuffed animals.

Next comes something you may find a little silly but certainly makes it more fun for us.  We go through a lot of canned goods.  Soups, pears, peaches, tuna, tomatoes, beans, corn, peas, and many others constantly land on our plates.  We added two can rotation shelves to the top to keep track of everything.  You load in the new cans at the top and they roll down the back of the shelf and come out the bottom, like a soda machine.  Then as you use food you always take from the bottom.  The oldest cans always get used first and you can be sure of good shelf life and keep track easily of what you need more of.  When I get real nerdy I’m going to label ours.  The only problem is that we actually could use another two of them.  Maybe later as they cost us about $60.[ad name=”250×250″]

The closet has some nice hooks on the door that work well for the kids 72 hour kits (which fit in backpacks). My 72 hour kit resides in two small soft sided coolers up in my clothes closet.  I’ll talk more in another post about what our kits contain but with each of the kids and my wife grabbing their backpacks, and me grabbing two small soft sided coolers, we could walk out of the house and live for three days without too many problems (except for comfortable sleeping).

The only real problem with the coat closet is water storage. Although you could survive with much less, it’s recommended that you keep 3 liters of water per person, per day.  We’ve been collecting 2 liter bottles for awhile, washing them in the dishwasher and then filling them with water.  Write the date on the side with a Sharpie and replace the water every 6 months.  We’ve got them in the coat closet, in my wife’s walk-in clothes closet, under the bed, and some in the garage.  I haven’t counted but my wife seems to think we have about 50 of them stashed around the house.

Just one last quick thought about water.  I would suggest adding a bottle of bleach (not scented please) in your storage room.  3 drops of bleach added to a liter of water (and left for 20 minutes) can kill almost all of the bad stuff.  I lived on water like this for two years while working as a missionary in South America.  I highly recommend some sugar-free juice powders to kill the taste, my favorite being red Fruit Punch.

What are you waiting for?  Get started.