Topic: Food Storage Photos

[trapeze]

I am curious as to what others have done in the way of food storage. And since I am asking for pictures I will put up my own first.

I haven't been working on food storage very long and consequently I don't have a tremendous amount of stuff. I am thinking, though, that by the end of the year I will have my shelves full. Or mostly full. And other than just kind of grouping like stuff together I don't have much in the way of "organization." I think that after the shelves become a bit more full the organization thing will begin to firm up and sort of sort itself out. What can I say? I make this stuff up as I go.

My food storage room is located below grade so it stays cool most of the year. Pretty good for wine storage and it probably helps with the longevity of the food stuffs, too. It is about fourteen feet wide, about twelve feet deep and eight feet high. Not huge but not small, either. I like to think of it as a good start. I have a lot of room at my commercial building and I guess that I will work on that after this room is completed.

So...this is the rear wall, the one I see when I walk into the room:

There are quite a few 2-liter bottles that I need to fill with stuff whether that is beans, macaroni, rice, potato flakes, sugar, water, etc. I will need to pick up some oxygen absorbing things and stuff one into each of the bottles as they fill. I can double stack 5-gallon buckets on the bottom shelf. I used 2x3 treated lumber to keep the bottom shelf off of the floor because every once in a while I will get some ground water seepage. If it happened more often I would jack hammer the floor and put a sump pump in but so far it's merely an annoyance. Need to put some mouse traps and bait down soon...we have four cats guarding against vermin but you can't be too careful.

Next is the wall to my left as I walk into the room:

Right now I have some non-food items on it (plus some carpentry tools). The cardboard boxes are some hotel items I acquired: bar soap, shampoo, conditioner and mouthwash. I figured that the small sizes would come in handy at some point for something. There is also a Coleman propane camp stove and a Food Saver vacuum packer there. Bleach. Batteries. Matches. Insect repellant. Butane lighters. Duct tape. I have a list I'm working on.

Looking the other way is this wall:

This is where I have been stacking most of the food that I have so far collected. I have a nice little wine rack that I salvaged from a liquor store that went out of business and there is also a vintage candy shelf from an old grocery store. A few 2-liter bottles that I have filled with rice, beans and sugar are on the top shelf. The wine rack is about a quarter of the way full...mostly with wine but lately I have been picking up liquor, instead. Several bottles now of high quality liquor (I hate cheap liquor). Sure wish I could store beer long term. Lots of soup. Lots of canned meat. Lots of canned veggies. And lots of room for lots more.

And a bit further to the left (adjacent to the door) is the long term food storage:

I started out the freeze dried stuff by picking up a few cans at a time from Walmart. Recently I have added a couple of cases of the Mountain House stuff. I am trying to budget around $250 or so a month for freeze dried and/or dehydrated food. Above that is propane canisters for use with the Coleman camp stove and some toiletry items.

When these shelves fill up I am going to add another floor to ceiling shelf unit that comes off of one of the walls and goes about four to six feet into the center of the room.

There is also quite a bit of room in the garage for storing non-food preps so there's that, too.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I would be interested to see what others have going on in this area.

[AlanS]

All I can say is you have way more storage than I do. Looks like a good start.

[Libertas]

No pictures, but our "bunker" has like a gazzillion 5gal pails of everything you can imagine, a ton of those cans like you have stacked adjacent to the door, MREs, and sundry supplies.  The pantry has enough extra dry goods and canned goods to last us quite a while on its own, but the latter has started to be cycled due to shorter lifespan.  Plus we have a myriad of different soaps, vinegar, bleach, amonia, several different water treatment processes and lots of storage containers, medical supplies, TP...I'm sure I'm missing something.  The pantry is relatively well organized, the "bunker" we just try to group in clusters for like items.  We have traps and poison about for pest control, a dehumidifier that keeps the place dry and drains the captured moisture into the ground.  We have gobs of other stuff stored in the garage-charcoal, propane in various sizes, more TP and such.  You use what you have as best you can!  
 

[IronDioPriest]

Looks good Trap. We have a similar stock (not nearly so much wine though  ). Ours is not nearly as well organized either. Nothing picture-worthy. It's all crammed onto wire-rack shelving in our unfinished basement in the unfinished bathroom we use as a storage space for all kinds of crap.

[trapeze]

No pictures, but our "bunker" has like a gazzillion 5gal pails of everything you can imagine, a ton of those cans like you have stacked adjacent to the door, MREs, and sundry supplies.  The pantry has enough extra dry goods and canned goods to last us quite a while on its own, but the latter has started to be cycled due to shorter lifespan.  Plus we have a myriad of different soaps, vinegar, bleach, amonia, several different water treatment processes and lots of storage containers, medical supplies, TP...I'm sure I'm missing something.  The pantry is relatively well organized, the "bunker" we just try to group in clusters for like items.  We have traps and poison about for pest control, a dehumidifier that keeps the place dry and drains the captured moisture into the ground.  We have gobs of other stuff stored in the garage-charcoal, propane in various sizes, more TP and such.  You use what you have as best you can! 
 

Need some pics of that. Sounds very nice.

[Weisshaupt]

Looks good Trap. We have a similar stock (not nearly so much wine though  ). Ours is not nearly as well organized either. Nothing picture-worthy. It's all crammed onto wire-rack shelving in our unfinished basement in the unfinished bathroom we use as a storage space for all kinds of crap.

Yeah, that is what ours looks like too. Hell the dehydrated I ordered for the new place is still sitting on the pallet it came on.  need to move it underground, but.. There is too much work going on down there for me to move it yet.. couple more weeks.

[Libertas]

No pictures, but our "bunker" has like a gazzillion 5gal pails of everything you can imagine, a ton of those cans like you have stacked adjacent to the door, MREs, and sundry supplies.  The pantry has enough extra dry goods and canned goods to last us quite a while on its own, but the latter has started to be cycled due to shorter lifespan.  Plus we have a myriad of different soaps, vinegar, bleach, amonia, several different water treatment processes and lots of storage containers, medical supplies, TP...I'm sure I'm missing something.  The pantry is relatively well organized, the "bunker" we just try to group in clusters for like items.  We have traps and poison about for pest control, a dehumidifier that keeps the place dry and drains the captured moisture into the ground.  We have gobs of other stuff stored in the garage-charcoal, propane in various sizes, more TP and such.  You use what you have as best you can!  
 

Need some pics of that. Sounds very nice.

Really, it's not.  

OK, maybe the garage since we got (most) everything on shelves and in bins (where possible) and the pantry (cabinets), the "bunker" (aka crawl space) has what we can stuff in it, pictures would probably only confuse people. We have other crap elsewhere, place resembles a serial hoarders dwelling in many respects.  I'll see what I can come up with for pics.  I better not tell my mother though, she's more paranoid than I am (if that's possible!).
 

[Pandora]

Speaking of paranoid ....

trap, check your PMs.

[Weisshaupt]

Speaking of paranoid ....

trap, check your PMs.

Hey, I am paranoid!  Do I get a PM?

[Pandora]

Speaking of paranoid ....

trap, check your PMs.

Hey, I am paranoid!  Do I get a PM?

Yes, you get a PM.  

[John Florida]

If it's below grade I would suggest a dehumidifier be put in place just as a safe guard. I use commercial shelving that I got out of a parts store that went out and owed me money. My stores go up and down so I don't have a lot on hand at this time but it's time to get back to stocking up.

[Weisshaupt]

If it's below grade I would suggest a dehumidifier be put in place just as a safe guard. I use commercial shelving that I got out of a parts store that went out and owed me money. My stores go up and down so I don't have a lot on hand at this time but it's time to get back to stocking up.

 What is this Humidity thing of which you speak? I don't think we have it in  Colorado.

(Yes, under the right conditions it could happen, but here you almost have to work to create them)

Early settlers here put dugouts into the side of a hill and called it food storage. Most of us have humidifiers on our central air system to add water to the air.. which gets brutally dry as it circulates through the burner, and wood left out in a field, uncoated and untreated,  will take  10-20 years to fully rot if it isn't lying in a stream bed. It won't hurt to have a dehumidifier  of course,
but there are probably higher priority goods. unless unusual amounts of water vapor are actually being observed in the basement.


 

[Libertas]

I like PMs!   

[trapeze]

No, humidity is not a problem where I live. It is as Weisshaupt says...lack of humidification is the usual issue.

I had an opportunity to go to the Walmart today which, I have often said is a very long drive from where I live, and I picked up another half a dozen of their #10 cans of freeze dried stuff. I am getting close to the limit of what Walmart can provide (they only have three entrees) and I think that I will need to start shopping exclusively online. The Mountain House products have a much bigger selection than Walmart does in pretty much every category.

Walmart does sell large five-gallon buckets of wheat berries that are supposed to be good for 30 years. I picked up one of those, too.

And onto the shelves they go.

[Pandora]

Well, it looks to me like a job well done as to the organization and carpentry.  I wish I had an empty space that size to fill because my stuff is in a couple places as well.

[Weisshaupt]

No, humidity is not a problem where I live. It is as Weisshaupt says...lack of humidification is the usual issue.

I had an opportunity to go to the Walmart today which, I have often said is a very long drive from where I live, and I picked up another half a dozen of their #10 cans of freeze dried stuff. I am getting close to the limit of what Walmart can provide (they only have three entrees) and I think that I will need to start shopping exclusively online. The Mountain House products have a much bigger selection than Walmart does in pretty much every category.

Walmart does sell large five-gallon buckets of wheat berries that are supposed to be good for 30 years. I picked up one of those, too.

And onto the shelves they go.

Shelves. I wish I had shelves.  It is beautifully done..

If and when I get round to properly storing this stuff again, I think I would like to get the automatically rotating racks..
No, it isn't that big of a deal to simply put the new stuff in the back, and we have been doing that.. but this is just easier..
[urk=http://www.costco.com/Shelf-Reliance-Harvest-Food-Rotation-System.product.11233458.html]Costco also sells them.. [/url]




Of course here is an idea for the DYI person who has the space.. and can't get to the back easy which could be easily adpatedinto what you already have built there...

[Alphabet Soup]

My house came with a couple cabinets similar to the lower one except the cans don't load from above (auto-rotate) and they are oriented 90 degrees to the ones pictured. At first I thought I would hate it. Now that I've gotten used to it I love it. Each cabinet features 8 tiers x 8 rows, with each row holding 5-6 cans. That's like 25 cases of canned goods in a space slightly larger than a dishwasher.

I picked up one of those stampers where you can change the date and mark the cans as they come into the house. Rotation is easy enough. If you have two rows of canned corn you pull off of one row until it's done, then you refill it and pull off the other row.

I don't have a room that I can dedicate to a pantry so I have several areas with free-standing shelving. It's not terribly organized but it gets the job done.

[Pandora]

How hard would it be to build a cabinet like that one, but instead of stationary shelves, put in low-profile drawers on pull-out hardware?  Not hard, I'd think, and perhaps not that expensive either.  The drawer can be pulled forward, new stuff loaded in the rear and none of it would be hard to get at.



Sort of like that ^^ .  The whole drawer assembly is expensive, but the hardware alone is not.

http://kitchenshelves.com/hardware.htm

[trapeze]

It's June so I bought another case of Mountain House freeze dried stuff. This time it was meat. I ordered it late at night and I honestly don't remember exactly what I got. Maybe it was diced chicken or beef or ground beef. Something like that. I guess I will know in a few days when it shows up.

In May I added a lot of drinking water to the shelves and also several more bottles of wine and high quality hard liquor. I even picked up a large bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon because I figured that I may as well get some before they change the recipe for the worse. I have to wonder if they are leaking rumors about making it more cheaply just to drive sales. Anyway, drinking is important, both water and recreational stuff. Or barter material depending on your point of view.

I have continued to increase the canned goods and dry goods. I picked up a thirty year container (like 5 gallons) of hard wheat at Walmart so I guess at some point I will need to get a grain mill.

I have one can of seeds. A variety of some sort. Supposed to be enough to make a garden for two or three people. I will be adding to that so that I have enough for several people. Also on the list are materials to construct a greenhouse. I have several hundred square feet of heavy, clear polyethylene sheeting and I'm thinking about PVC pipe and fittings necessary to making some kind of a curved structure like a quonset hut.

Overall, though, things are coming along nicely. I think that by the end of this year I will have a minimum of six months of food in storage.

Another thing that I have been looking at is silver. I am thinking that it would be a good idea to have a few thousand dollars of old US silver coins on hand in the dime, nickel and quarter denominations. Perhaps purchase a few hundred dollars worth per month for a year or so. Two or three rolls of dimes per bug-out-bag would be a good thing, I think.

Ammunition and firearms I am in pretty good shape in already but that continues to grow, as well.

Fun, fun, fun.

[charlesoakwood]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/excellent-reasons-to-drink-more-whiskey