Emergency Kits (Part 3): How to Organize Everything?
Note: This is Part 3 of a five-part series about emergency kits and emergency planning.
By Melissa Spencer
So, we had gathered all our emergency supplies! It was both exciting and overwhelming when I actually laid them all out.
Wow! Look at all this great stuff! Um…what in the world are we going to do with all of it?
As a reminder, here is a picture of all the emergency supplies we gathered:
A little overwhelming, no?
I felt like organizing all these supplies was almost as important as getting them. Knowing where our supplies are when we need them is key. So, once again, I decided to group them into categories and see if we could store them that way as well. Here are the categories we came up with:
Water
Food
Supplies for all emergencies, including sheltering in place
Supplies specifically for evacuation
We decided to start with 3 large plastic bins to store as many of the supplies in as we could and thankfully they worked great for the majority of our stuff.
Water
We used one of the plastic bins to store 9-gallon jugs of water. It’s heavy but it makes storing the water jugs a lot more manageable (and stack-able!). Thankfully, the flat of water bottles and our Aqua-tainer are pretty self-contained.
Food
I was determined to fit all of our canned and boxed food items in another one of the bins if possible. It took a bit of creativity and a healthy dose of stubbornness to get it all to fit, but somehow I made it work. (All those hours playing Tetris over the years finally panned out - ha!) The pre-packaged emergency food is already in 2 reasonably sized boxes.
Supplies for all emergencies, including sheltering in place
Our third plastic bin was used to hold our supplies for all emergencies – first aid kit, water purification tablets, lanterns, flashlights, etc. It also has all the extension cords we need to get power from our generator to predetermined key areas of our house.
Supplies for evacuation
The biggest challenge was how to store the supplies we collected specifically for evacuation. I thought maybe a wheeled duffle bag that could fit a lot of supplies, yet still be easy to transport, could work. The first one I ordered was huge. Way too bulky and more room than we needed. The second one I found was too small. (I feel like this story is starting to sound familiar…)
But the next one was juuuuuust right. In fact, I love the duffle we found. Not only is it water resistant, it has several zippered sections instead of being one big open space. It makes it a lot easier to organize supplies in a way that should make them easier to find. It’s pretty heavy now that it’s full, but the wheels and extendable handle make it transportable.
We also used our 5-gallon bucket with a lid to carry a few supplies – namely our charcoal briquettes, a few fire starting options, and our fire extinguisher.
Final Steps
Once I finally had a place for everything (and everything was in its place!) I marked on my master list of supplies where each item is located, printed out a copy of the list and placed it in a notebook. This notebook will also contain a copy of our family emergency plan (more on that in an upcoming post!). I also put a sheet in the top of each storage container that says what is located within.
Here are pictures of everything once organized:
Our emergency supplies still take up a decent amount of space but it’s much more manageable – both in terms of storage and finding what we need when we need it.
Now, where are we going to store our supplies?
Ah, yes. A very important question indeed.
My first thought was in the garage. You can always make a little more room in there, right? But our seasons are too drastic for that. We don’t want to have stuff freezing in the winter or overheating in the summer.
We needed a cool, dry place to store it. We thought through our options and decided on a closet storage space in the lower level of our house. It’s out of the way but still easily accessible. I had to do some clean-out first, but it was time to do that anyway, and I’m really pleased with the end result. Now everything except our generator and fuel is stored in one central location. It’s all well-marked and labeled.
(See the pic at the beginning of this post.)
Do well-organized things and spaces make anyone else ridiculously happy like it does me?