Great Places to Hide Your Food Storage

Let’s face it, when the SHTF, food is going to be a precious commodity, even more so than gold in many cases, so you’re going to want to make sure you have your stash well hidden from anyone who tries and succeeds to enter your home, whether you’re there or not. Here, we list a few places in which you can store your food storage, beyond where you normally keep your food.

Inside the Empty Space of your Walls & Ceiling

Homes have been build the same way for decades, so chances are your interior walls will have that 3-4 inch space between your drywall and exterior wall. If you remove the drywall from one side and then remove the insulation (you’ll want to use gloves and long-sleeve overalls for that), you’ll see a space between your walls that might also include some piping and electrical wires. Utilizing any empty space for shelves can provide you with a great place to store long-life goods. Once you’ve built your shelves, simply replace the drywall, match it to the existing paint job of your walls, and you’re good to go!

Closets and Windows

Putting a shelf above the door of your closet provides a great compartment that is likely to be overlooked by searchers, especially if there’s not a light inside your closet. You can also make compartments behind your back walls similar to the wall compartments discussed above. Also, if you have a wide shelf-like area below your windows (most modern homes do), you can turn this into a boxed compartment as well with a little wood, paint, and imagination, and then have easy access to your food storage by simply lifting the shelf, which you can turn into a lid.

Hidden Rooms or Compartments

If you’re really ambitious, you can build a hidden room out of a room that already exists, say in your basement. Turn the room’s door into a heavy bookcase that is opened via hidden latch (a pull-out or push-in book is a good idea) or even via combination lock that is hidden behind the books. The combination locks can be utilized by building a small hidden compartment in your bookshelf for the combination lock itself and placing books in front of it. Think of a safe, only with books hiding the combination lock as a diversion.

Once you’ve built this, make sure that any outside windows are either filled in or hidden so they can’t be seen from the outside and you’ve got an entire room for food storage.

Alternatively, you can use a large walk-in closet, an under-the-floor room method, or utilize your space under your staircase for your hidden room. Various ways of hiding the entrance include false backs, rugs, carpet, or decoys, such as furniture.

Furniture

Speaking of furniture, you can even utilize your furniture to hide some food storage. Replacing the dust cover in your furniture should yield you some extra storage space or building a secondary tabletop for all your tables; food can be stashed between the two tops. Box springs of your bed, empty space in speaker boxes, empty spots in your washer and dryer, or spaces inside, above or beneath your kitchen cabinets can be used.

In Your Yard

It may seem obvious but sometimes the oldest tricks are the best, and in this case there’s some truth to that old bromide. You can bury your food storage using a variety of containers, including barrels, metal boxes, safes (nothing too heavy, of course), and other things. It’s not a good idea to use something that will decompose to quickly; you want your food storage to stay clean and fresh.

In all of these cases, it’s important to make sure you have plenty of diversions and back-up plans (i.e. if your home is burned down, have food stored elsewhere too). Where else can you think of to store food?