After General Conference in April of this year, Michael and I decided to get serious about our families emergency preparedness, especially our food storage. We have been pretty good about keeping and maintaining our 72-hour kits, and have tried to have a month's worth of extra food, but that's about it. And even those things were haphazard. We didn't have emergency preparedness items such as a fire extinguisher or our important documents together in one place or an evacuation plan, etc, etc. It is very overwhelming when you think about all this stuff! But we knew we had to start somewhere...
So we started having every other family home evening be devoted to something about preparedness. Sometimes we just talked about its importance and blessings, other times we did hands-on things like update our 72-hour kits or check our smoke alarms, and other times we planned out what we were going to purchase or can to add to our food storage. We started accumulating more than our pantry would hold, and wondered where all our food storage would go.
We decided to clean out our under-the-stairs storage closet and put all our preparedness items in there. Unfortunately, everything just started getting stacked on top of everything else because there was no shelving or any way to organize the items. Should a real emergency really occur, there was no way we were going to be able to find anything. It took us several weeks, but we finally cleaned out the closet and purchased shelves to line the walls.
We forgot to get a before picture, but here is all the emergency preparedness stuff unorganized and taken out of the closet so we could install the shelves.
Shaelyn thought we put out all those water bottles just for her to play with. She had a blast climbing through them and shaking them all.
Michael squeezed into the tiny closet to drill and install. He did a great job!
For one of our family home evenings, we discussed how we are preparing our own "ark" just like Noah of old. We read over the new food storage and preparedness guide the first presidency sent out in a recent Ensign and put all the information on the door for a quick reference. We now refer to our storage closet as "the ark".
Here it is once we got all our shelves installed and the food and other items organized inside. We still have a long way to go before we have everything that we need, but we are very proud of our efforts and pleased with how great the ark looks! If anyone wants to know what we want for Christmas, anything to help us add to our ark would be greatly appreciated!
