30 Day Emergency Stay at Home Plan: Setting up Storage

It’s so easy to say that we are ready to handle a disaster but when we actually start to physically account for it we quickly realize that maybe we are not. Again I am acting as a visionary through the idea of an Emergency Management Professional walking through my home and asking me to show him my plan and proof of my preparations. I am going to call my imaginary friend “John” and we will be taking a journey into my plan for preparedness at the first stage which would be staying in my home and surviving for 30 days.

Today is my first visit with John and with clip board in hand he asked me if I have a staging area to track all of the things I will need to make it through the next 30 days. I show him the shelving units that I constructed in the garage and explain to him the plan I have.

I plan on creating area’s on these shelves for certain things which I started purchasing a while back from Home Depot. The were a bit costly so I purchased them in stages until I was able to complete what you see above. I also found a locking file cabinet on Craigslist for $25.00 that will provide for additional storage of things that need to be in closed spaces.

I have a lot of work to do, but my intentions are to break down different area’s of these shelves to create categories of survival. I will create area’s for water, food and bathroom supplies to start off. John said that there would be plenty of room on these shelves for these items and loved the idea of breaking things down into specific categories. He asked me what all the crap was up on the top shelf and with a little embarrassment I explained that they are certain items that I haven’t yet moved to a better storage location yet. He then asked me what tool I had in mind to physically track these things and I responded by telling him that I would be using a simple notebook to keep track of each category. “Excellent” John said, too many people try to create a small database on their computers or cell phones. The truth is that when there is no power the last thing we want to do is use up battery power to track inventory. The old faithful notebook is more than enough unless eventually you decide to turn it into a printed excel spreadsheet, but for now the notebook is perfect. John said he was going to wrap things up for today but will return tomorrow to discuss each one of these categories that I am creating for my storage area.

Before John left I stopped him and said, “I want you to understand something before we continue, I am a minimalist”. John’s eyes widened with excitement and told me, “Perfect, one of the things that most people forget about is the importance of purchasing in bulk. Too many people who proclaim to be minimalists simply keep the minimum amount of things which they use each day in their homes. The truth is that they drive to shop more and usually end up spending more than they need to when they do. Although it would seem controversial to store the maximum amount of these things it is actually a minimalist opportunity to only purchase those things that you actually use, while not purchasing those things that we really don’t need.” “Even if a disaster doesn’t happen we still need the basics to survive our daily lives.”