When people begin to prep, there’s this mental thing that happens… they begin to store things in buckets. For some, it’s cat litter buckets. For others, it’s the big white buckets you can often get for free at grocery stores. They’re usually five gallon size, and they have a hard plastic exterior which is difficult for mice to chew through, and a plastic handle that’s decently rugged. The cat litter ones are usually more squarish in shape, which is great for holding ammo, candles, square tins (like Spam), and the like. The white ones are round, and are awesome for rice, wheat, lentils, coffee, etc.
For me, the five gallon bucket was too small after a while. I started getting piles of the things, and I didn’t like it. So I switched from those to Sterelite bins, the light grey ones. Those are alright, but if you stack them more than two high and they’re heavy, they will buckle under the weight. Those were replaced with good quality rigid Rubbermaid bins. The Rubbermaids last, have mouse proof (so far at least, and we’re talking ten years or more in a farm house with tons of mice) exteriors, and a decent seal at the top as well. You can stack them three high if they’re heavy, and four high if you make the top one light.
Once I reached the bin stage in my prepping, I began making single-item bins. This bin was labelled “rice” and contained countless smaller bags or boxes of rice. That one was labelled “wheat” and another was “beans.” You get the general idea. I thought this was an amazing idea! Everything was neat, labelled, easy to find… just perfect.
And then we had an emergency with a power loss of a few days. Suddenly, I had to find our emergency stores in the dark, in the basement. I had to crack 5 gallon buckets and big plastic bins to take out one or two things, and then seal them up again. It wasn’t fun. It made carrying things up the stairs more difficult. I got frustrated.
Now, I make multi-purpose bins. One bin sits in the hallway, tucked into a quiet corner. Each grocery trip, I pick something up and stash it in the bucket. I make sure each bucket has a good mix of protein (canned meat and fish, powdered eggs, peanut butter, a can of nuts, and you name it), carbs (instant potatoes, rice, pasta, flour), and fats (mostly in the form of natural fats in the cans of meat and fish, but sometimes I find canned butter and the like, and also small bottles of vegetable or olive oil). Toss in some paper plates, matches, a P-38 can opener, some fuel and one of the folding mini stoves, along with plastic forks or spoons and a couple of mags of ammo, and you’re all set. Each bucket is self-contained. I can grab ANY bucket, and know it has a bit of everything, and that it’ll be just different enough from the next bucket to ensure my family doesn’t get bored with single-flavor nutrition.
For me and mine, this system works wonderfully. Everyone needs to develop their own system, though. All I suggest is that you give your system a real try, either during a real minor emergency or a fake pre-planned emergency, so you can see how it works. You may be surprised.
I prefer the multi-purpose bins for one other reason. I can grab a single bucket and run out the door and have a decent number of complete meals on hand, and all the tools necessary to make them. With the single item bins, grabbing a single bin would only get me a lot of rice, or a lot of beans. While we don’t intend to bug out (for many reasons), there’s always a possibility that we have to leave in a hurry, and being able to grab whatever we can and stuff it in the back of the car makes me very happy.
I also have things that are specific and easy to grab for other items around the house. My personal hygiene items are all kept in a single dopp kit which hangs in the bathroom. It has tabs to let me secure it to either my purse, my suitcase, or my military backpack. Grabbing my backpack (ie my go bag) means I’ve grabbed my first aid kit (both PFAK and a larger one for use with other people), shelter (clothing, military poncho and liner, and in winter, my sleep system), water (a full canteen which I keep ready to go, plus a life straw and some bleach tablets for purifying water), food (some small snack type items and an MRE), and a few books and a pack of cards. My full “rule of three” bag, grabbed in two seconds on my way out the door.
I also practice hiking with the kit on. At this point, even being overweight I can hump my pack for miles if I pace myself. The sleep system is bulky and heavy, and would probably be the first thing I ditched if I had to, because I have the poncho and liner, which make decent shelter and weigh a tenth of what the sleep system does. But still, it’s there. I can use it if necessary.
What other things can be stored? Knowledge is the first thing that comes to mind. Knowledge is our greatest tool in any kind of emergency, from a standard winter power outage to a full on apocalypse. I have an extensive library in our front hallway that includes hundreds of books on how to build furniture, how to build a home, how to make a small steam engine, how to make fuel, how to preserve food, how to build bush shelters, and a zillion other topics. If I had to leave on foot, I couldn’t take that with me, though. Because of that, I have a second phone which is easy to charge with my solar charger. It contains digital copies of many books, and because it’s no longer connected to anything, the contents can’t be removed by a third party. It might be destroyed in an EMP, but I’m in the process of picking up a small Faraday bag to keep it in when I’m not actively using it.
I’m always curious how others store their preps. What do you guys do?
Comments
10 responses to “Prepping – Storage Thoughts”
the big rectangular cat litter containers are great for storing chains. cut out around the cap to make the hole bigger. feed the chain in and hang the hook on the edge.. good ideas here. you might want to get a small flashlight and carry it with you all the time. I put mine in a mag pouch on my belt.. I luv the “why do you have a flashlight” question… duh.
Yeah, we bought a hundred pack of those cheap ones, and I stashed one in each of my bins for a while, along with an unopened pack of fresh batteries. I also have solar lights that I use, and my partner has a wind up one.
batteries will last a long time in storage if you have room in your freezer for them.
I have a bunch of the big 27-gal “construction” bins (usually black with yellow lids) available at Costco and the local BBHI (Big Box Home Improvement) stores. They stack extremely well, 3 and 4 high even if they’re heavy. And 2- and 5-gallon buckets for food items. I highly recommend springing for the screw-top gamma lids, at least for the ones you use often; they make accessing and resealing MUCH quicker and easier than the pop-tops.
(I also recommend springing for a 4-wheel dolly and a hand-truck to help with moving these things around, especially if they’re fully loaded. Your back will thank you!)
A while ago we invested in a consumer-grade freeze dryer, and stored away a few month’s worth of meals in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. They probably won’t be 30-year-to-indefinitely-stable like commercial freeze-dried meals, but it’s real food we actually eat, unlike the ultra-processed food-like-substances in the store-bought “emergency” food packs. If it only lasts 10 years, it’s still worth having, in my opinion. (Plus, the dryer was good for freeze-drying candy, which is a much more lucrative side-hustle than you might think; the machine paid for itself inside 6 months.) We ended up selling it when we moved, but kept all the food we had prepared.
+1 on curby’s suggestion of flashlights. If you have to grab-n-go and can’t stop until after dark, it’s much more difficult to prepare a meal if you can’t see what you’re doing. I keep light sources everywhere they’ll fit — chemical light sticks or small handheld flashlights in buckets and larger lanterns in bins; not every bucket and bin, but enough that we’ll probably have at least one. I carry another one on my belt in a purpose-built flashlight holder (the mag pouch houses a multi-tool and — interestingly enough — a spare magazine).
I grew up in the Boy Scouts (before they went Woke), and my barest-of-bare-minimum preps follows the “10 Essentials”, which includes a good flashlight.
Personally, I like the 500-ish lumen Duracell ones Costco sells in 3-packs for around $20 ($15 on sale); I’ve had them for years and they’re rugged enough (not completely waterproof, though), and for that price I have them tucked all over the house and one in every car. The local BBHI store carries similar-size and -output Energizer-branded ones for similar price. But hey, you do you, and use what you’ve got. Even the 99-cent LED ones at every store’s checkout stations are better than nothing.
I do like those big bins, but they’re a bit beyond my price range, and a big heavier than I can handle when full. And that’s another thing, actually… prep what you can handle. No sense having something you can’t use, right? Heh…
The gamma lids are nice. I’d like to get some for the buckets I bring upstairs, but with my new system, it isn’t quite as pressing. I was originally going to do that for flour and salt and sugar, but again, I found another method of storing those that works very well for me, so I don’t bother. I do like the gamma lids, though.
Dollies, we have. Three of them, in fact. One is a heavy duty, and the other two are smaller and fold up, but they’re all capable of handling one of anything we’ve got around the house. Dehydrator… I’d love to have a freeze dryer, but we have the dehydrator and I make do with that. 🙂 For me, that’s also how I practice. I like things I can keep using without power, and I know how to dehydrate and can without using any power.
“Give me enough ammo cans and a labelmaker, and I can organize the world.”
– anonymous post somewhere on the net.
Seriously, good stuff above – thanks!
One thing we’ve started trying to do, is to reduce the max. weight of an individual bin to something we can manage alone – neither Mrs. B nor I are getting any younger. Yes we have good hand trucks; but stuff still needs to be lifted and stacked.
Another thing we’ve done is started to put markers on some of our emergency containers – bright tags indicating “ready to go.” Red means “take these first,” yellow means “take these if there’s time and room.” We live in forest fire country, among other potential local hazards, so there’s a real possibility we won’t have more than a few minutes’ warning to “grab and go.” Having easy to identify labels does a couple of things for us. One, we don’t have to segregate everything out as well, which helps when we change loadings etc. Two, if family or friends are around, or the neighbors come over to help, it makes it much easier for the help to be, well, actually helpful rather than a hindrance. “Stuff with red tags into Boris’s pickup. Yellow tags into Mrs B’s Jeep.”
Yeah, most of the bins here have a good mix of light and heavy stuff, which was also a reason I switched to multiple types of foods in a bin. One bin with all rice was more than I could lift by myself! Now, there’s rice in each bin, but there are also packs of dehydrated fruit, some seaweed, and other light stuff, which makes it much more manageable.
I don’t have marks on our bins, but I do have a system. Things that are “ready to go” or “take first” are upstairs. Intermediates are in the basement near the stairs. The rest are clearly labeled but stashed all over the place (because I believe in letting raiders find a bit of stuff so they’ll leave me alone). 🙂
A comment re Faraday bags – they’re not all equal, and you need to figure out a way to test yours before you really trust it.
For instance, I have a small pouch, advertised as a Faraday bag, for my car’s key fob. It’s one of the “active” styles with an RFID chip. When I’m traveling (which is far too often) I put my keyfob in the pouch to provide some shielding against cloning attacks etc.
So far so good … until the time I came back to my car, unlocked it with a hand on the handle, got in and started it up … and then realized I had never taken the fob out of the “shielded” bag it was in.
another good Faraday cage storage device is an old microwave oven. you can get them free on the side of the road when people want to get rid of them. test it by putting your cell phone in it, shut the door and call your cell. if the cage is good the phone won’t ring..
Yeah, testing and practicing are two things people forget a LOT. 😉