Tight Space Prepping: Make The Most Of The Storage Space You Have

When you are living in a condo or a small apartment, there is only so much space to keep a food storage. You need to be able to use all the storage space you have available to you. You also need to use storage space that you never considered before, thus finding storage space you didn’t know you had!

Finding storage space in your doors, walls, & ceilings!

I look at my home in three dimensions. The floor is a given space storage area. It’s the easiest space when it comes to storage. Gravity even cooperates. The spaces that we rarely use are our walls, doors, and ceiling. Here are a few tips for utilizing those spaces for storage.

• • Doors are a great place to put hooks, and hooks can be placed on every door in your home.
  • In the bathroom, you can place hooks for your towels and bathrobes on the back of each door.
  • Hooks on bedroom doors can hold a laundry bag.
  • Putting hooks up in the coat closet affords you the opportunity to store more coats, jackets and other outerwear.
  • The ceiling is a great place to put stuffed animals. Stuffed animal hammocks are good for storing items that may have been taking up floor space in your rooms or closets. String them across a corner of your room.
  • Also use those hammocks for storing items like soft toys, pajamas or socks. This works particularly well for those small rooms that have small or no closet space. These hammocks, however, should never be hung over a bassinet or baby crib. Clothes or stuffed animals falling on your sleeping five-year-old is one thing. It’s more of a concern when these items can fall into an infant’s bed.
  • Other items that can be hung on the wall are cooking pots (especially a copper set, which can pass as decorative) mugs,(in the space on the wall between the wall cabinets and counters) and blankets, which can pass as a tapestry-like decoration.
  • Utilize the space above doorways by installing an attractive shelf in that area.

Creative ideas for storing linens

Blankets are the easiest items to store. We store them by not storing them. I have had some great feedback about blankets being stored by covering both furniture or windows. Our family stores blankets at the foot of each bed. On cold nights we don’t even need to get out of bed to find a spare blanket. Extra sheets can be stored in pillowcases and used as extra pillows.

Another space-saving idea for storing blankets is to lay them flat between the mattress and box springs of a bed. You can store several on each bed this way.

TIP: 6 Reasons to Stockpile Blankets!

Closets can store more than clothes!

Now it’s time to make your closets into water closets. ( No, I don’t mean bathrooms). Water is sometimes one of the hardest items to store. It has to take up space somewhere, and it’s heavy. In our home, our stored water lives in our closets.  We keep our clothes hung up and place the five-gallon bottles of water on the closet floor. Smaller water storage (refilled juice and soda bottles) get stored on the higher closet shelving. This includes the linen closet and coat closet. Even in our postage stamp apartment, we can store enough water in our smaller bottles for six weeks. Perfect for times of drought or a water sanitation plant malfunction.

The only closet space we exempt from water storage is the bedroom shelves in our master bedroom closet. That space we use to store first aid and medical supplies. There is a lock on the bedroom door and the medications are stored up high. This works great if you have a toddler who likes to engineer climbing apparatus.

The closet in a child’s bedroom or playroom is ideal for keeping a home safe since many burglars first look for valuables in a master bedroom. Disguise your safe in a toy box or cardboard box marked, “Old Toys” for both security and newly found storage space.

TIP: Check out the details on these home safes. Be sure to find the right one for your own needs.

Kitchen Storage Space

When working with kitchen cupboards you want to be able to get the most out of your space for extra food storage rather than storing other stuff. In our home this means having the minimum amount of dishes and cookware for our family. For example, we have four people in our home. We also have only four place settings of dishes. We have four glasses and four mugs. As your family grows and changes you may need to add a few things such as sippy cups and bottles (two each, one can be dirty while the other is clean). All dishes get stored in one cupboard, preferably the smallest one. When we have guests we simply get paper products. This also helps with the clean up when people come calling.

TIP: Find out why paper plates are a great item for stocking up.

Pots in our home don’t go in cupboards at all. We have found that most apartment stoves have a drawer under the oven. That is where we keep our pots, pans and other cookware. These items don’t take up any cupboard space at all.

My mixing bowls ( a new addition to the kitchen) double for storage items when I need to put leftovers in the fridge. Before I got mixing bowls I simply used pots for both mixing and storage. My favorite was the crockpot. This greatly reduced my cupboard clutter leaving room for plenty of food storage space.

Outside Storage Space

If you have any outside storage space, it is the last place you want to put your food storage. You can’t control the temperature of the storage area and your food could be compromised.

TIP: Learn about the 6 enemies of food storage. Your stored food is more vulnerable than you might think.

Instead, this is a great place for survival hardware that you don’t keep in your 72-hour kits or use on a regular basis. For example, keep your hand-cranked washer and drying racks in the patio shed. The hand-cranked power generator or that camp stove that can run off a car battery could live in the patio storage space as well.

Finding storage space in small spaces bears some similarity to the process one goes through to blend a prepping lifestyle and a minimalist lifestyle. Check out this article for some ideas that might help make your tight space more effective.

What other creative storage spaces have you discovered?

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Teraesa Farrell

Teraesa Farrell is a free lance writer, mother of two children and wife to a mechanic. She has been a military brat, nurse and pharmacy tech.

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