Depending on your living situation and available space, you may want to consider spreading out your stockpile between more than one person, more than one location or more than one household.
If you are living in a shared house, it may make more sense to build a communal stockpile. You might just want to share the more common or bulky items, or you might want to go all-in and construct and manage your stockpile together.
If you have access to storage space outside your home, you might want to think about storing some of your stockpile there — but be careful to make sure that items are stored appropriately (for instance sealed boxes for food if it is being stored somewhere like a garage where animals or insects might be able to enter) and that you follow any appropriate regulations. (Most self-storage units won’t allow the storage of food or of cleaning products.)
Alternatively, you might want to work with friends or family living in more than one household to create a pool of stockpiled resources.
Some of the things to consider when setting up arrangements of this type would be:
- Who pays for the items? Will you split the costs evenly, or does an uneven distribution of costs make more sense for your situation?
- Who chooses the items? It’s all very well if Aunty Lil buys fifty packets of her favourite bread mix, but if little Johnny is on a gluten-free diet then he may find those less useful. Better to have a conversation about what is required before anyone goes shopping.
- Who stores which items? Are you going to store all the toilet roll in one place and all the tins in another?
- How do you get to the items? If transport or fuel is disrupted then having all your stockpiled food twenty miles away may not be too useful.
- Do you all trust one another? “Oops, we seem to be out of butter, I must have accidentally eaten all of it.”
It might be an idea to agree some things in writing, if you can – but at least make sure you have considered the points above.