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By Christiana
Not everyone has a large basement, cellar or garage for their prepping needs. There are many preppers who live in big cities, and have to find a good place to store food, supplies, and other items despite their small apartments and close quarters. In my case, I solved the prepping problem by stocking up in a Chicago storage unit.
Here’s a bit of background: My husband and I live and work in downtown Chicago with our two young children. We started thinking about prepping after the 2011 Chicago snow storm, when 20 inches of snow left 95,000 Chicago residents without power and many of us without supplies. We had a toddler and a newborn then, and I told my husband we were never again going to risk our children’s lives in the event of a snow storm like this one. That’s when we started learning about prepping.
Our first question was where we would put all of the food that prepping websites recommend. Our apartment doesn’t even have a full-sized kitchen; one wall of the living room contains a few cupboards, a stove/oven unit, a sink, and a refrigerator. We tried putting cans of food and bottles of water in our bedroom closet, but quickly realized we were never going to have enough space for what we needed.
So we turned to a different option: Chicago storage. We scanned storage listings in the Chicago area, looking for units that would fit our requirements: climate-controlled, 24-hour access, accessible even if other businesses in the area might be closed (say, during a blizzard). We wanted our own key to the unit as well as the overall storage facility; we didn’t want to have to rely on a guard to let us in.
Once we found what we wanted, it was time to start prepping. Our goal was to have three weeks of food and water stored in our home, and three months of food and water stored in the storage unit. We may be the only apartment on our block with jugs of water lined up underneath the master bed, but we managed to squeeze in enough food to keep our family of four well-provided for three weeks. Putting the rest of our food supply in the storage unit was no problem; we were able to stack it all up with room to spare.
Our family is taking prepping seriously, and that includes the idea that we need to regularly use and restock our food supply. My husband and I have both read Prepper’s Food Storage and taken the instructions to heart. We visit our storage unit each month and bring some food back home to eat, and then restock the unit with fresh supplies. Same goes with our apartment’s three-week supply of food; we eat some of it every week, restock with fresh cans and packages of food, and practice FIFO: first in, first out. That way, we know we always have recently-purchased food in our supply.
Of course, we’re banking this plan on the idea that, should something happen to the city, we’ll be able to make it to the storage unit if we need our extra food. In the case of a blizzard, it shouldn’t be a problem; my husband and I both have snowshoes and good cold-weather gear, and if the entire city is shut down we’ll have plenty of time to walk to the storage unit and carry back the food we need.
If there is a different type of threat, such as an epidemic, it may be more difficult to reach the storage unit. We may be asked — or forced — to shelter in place. In that case, I am going to trust and hope that our three-week food supply is enough, or that sometime during the three weeks we will have an opportunity to visit the storage unit.
I know that a storage unit isn’t perfect — it would be better if we could keep our food and water supply in our own home. However, when you’re living with barely 800 square feet to your name, you don’t have a lot of space to keep extra supplies. I’m crossing my fingers that, should the time come for us to need our storage unit, we’ll be able to access it and use what we’ve stored.
If there are other urban preppers using storage units, or even suburban or rural preppers who have put items into a storage unit, I’d love to hear from you. The more information we share, the better we can all be prepared.
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