Food Storage

We have a cold food storage room under our front porch that is cement all around. I tried to use it for food storage but with no shelves or lights in there, it was kind of hard. So everything ended up getting put outside of that room in our basement. Here's a picture of how bad it was.

You can see the water piling out of the food storage room and all our food on the floor on the left (still in bags), along with the shelves we got (great deal on craigslist), coolers, and some of the camping stuff on the right. Not exactly the best way to build food storage, especially when you don't know what you have!

This is what our food storage room looked like to the left when you walked in (see that far right corner? Jared found 2 jars of mayo I had forgotten about that expired in January 2010!). My handy, amazing husband installed that light above (there was no light before).

This is what it looked like to the right - 3 bags of wheat (on a pallet to keep them off the floor) and a LOT of milk/soda/juice jugs full of water. (Jared installed that light too.)

This is what it looked like when we tossed all the water through the basement window onto our front "lawn".

This is after! So so so much better. I can actually see what we have and what we need now. I found 4 cans of Rotel (diced tomatoes and green chilies) that I had looked for before and couldn't find.

I know, we don't have much cereal. Good thing I'm going to the store later. Just kidding! I had gone to the store while they were having a sale, with a bunch of coupons (I also had a raincheck for some of the ones that had been on sale the week before but weren't on sale this time). Some of the cereal we had but the rest came from that trip. I got 33 boxes of cereal for $.67 to $1.17 each - mostly Kelloggs and a few Quaker.

This is much better for water storage. Ace Hardware had these on a closeout special for $29.99 each (they were used - they were filled with soy sauce before). We had two $5 off coupons for Ace so we went and each got one. Jared cleaned them out and we filled them with water. I was at the store earlier that day and found a siphon pump so I got that to get the water out when it comes time to use it. I also got some more buckets so all the wheat is now in buckets instead of the bags. It is so much nicer and I'm actually excited to get more food storage now! Watch out cannery here we come! (Just kidding:))