Jodi's Three Month Supply Problem

Basement junk making it difficult to reach long term food storage buckets
Bags of groceries dumped on the floor BESIDE the shelves
Canning supplies scattered in multiple places
Shelves for 3 month supply are hard to access, hard to see, and hard to reach

My big excuse is that I had a baby 7 weeks ago. So for probably a good 5-6 months I avoided going down to the storage area like a plague. My sweet hubby would refill my containers upstairs with my long term foods. And my sweet 5 year old son would run down and grab cans of veggies or soup when I needed them for a recipe.

The problem could no longer be ignored when I sent my son down to grab a can of tomato soup for a recipe. He told me there wasn’t any. I didn’t believe him, because I should have at LEAST 10 cans down there. The soup is normally on the left shelf (see above) so I had to navigate around that junk to look for the soup. To my dismay there WASN’T any TOMATO SOUP. UGH! This is not supposed to happen to me.

A complete reorganization of my storage space
Elimination of space hogging (and leak-prone) water jugs
Discarding of multiple foods items that were long past expiration
Re-inventory of my three month supply spreadsheet

Once I had reorganized and catalogued my foods I realized how much I had depleted my storage over the past months. My “three month supply” was more like a partial 2 week supply plus a billion stewed tomatoes and mandarin oranges.

Print out my list of “Need to Buy” items
Use Deals to Meals (LOVE THEM!) over the next few weeks to catch the items when they are on sale
Put foods straight onto shelves as I purchase them
Fill up my new water storage boxes
Buy or build more Can Racks as needed to improve rotation
Buy better shelves some day (these are second hand and kind of odd-sized)
Keep stocking up on my long term food storage now that I’m using it so much!

We quite often get asked to see an example of a filled out sheet, but I’ve always been a little embarrassed to share what we eat. I’ve finally overcome my fear and I’m willing to share. Hope it is helpful for you!

Jodi’s Three Month Supply Spreadsheet