Removing Barriers to Disaster Preparedness

Prepping is overwhelming and we all seem to have barriers that keep us from taking even baby steps. For me, it was storage. I like an organized and orderly environment and don't like to bring things into my home unless I have a place for them.

Over the last year, my wife and I have accumulated about 50 gallons of water in one-gallon jugs and a handful of cases of bottled water. Since we didn't have any place to put it, we ended up with all of it in the middle of the floor in a room in the basement we don't use. We also add a few canned goods and dried food pouches to a shelf in that same basement room.

I didn't really want to add anything more because we just didn't have a good place to put it. Storage was very much a barrier for me. Two weekends ago, I decided to do something about it and built a new set of shelves in our spare basement room. The center trunk is 72 inches wide, 48 inches tall, and 24 inches deep. I plan to build out shelves on top of that when we need it. The two side sections are 36 inches wide, 18 inches deep, and 40 inches tall. The sides have 12-inch deep shelves that run all the way to the ceiling.

Now we have a ton of storage room for both food and other items we will need to be prepared. We already moved everything from our small kitchen pantry to this larger pantry so we can keep everything in one place. Each week when we do a meal plan, we'll move items for that week's menu from the basement to the kitchen's pantry so we should be able to keep things rotated, and we'll review what's in the pantry as we make each week's meal plan.

We also took this opportunity to purge our basement of a lot of old furniture, electronics, books, and magazines we no longer need. This opened up even more storage space so for the foreseeable future, I'd say this barrier has been removed. And the extra cash we made selling a few unused items from the basement paid for the wood.