Our home isn’t small but it has a serious lack of pantry space for anyone who tries to stockpile food. We also don’t have gas to the house and have a glass top stove. Those two things have been challenging for food preservation to a certain degree. It can be done in small spaces and creatively. However, it’s not ideal to set-up and tear down anytime you need to do some canning.
Our canned and bulk food storage is currently split between the kitchen pantry and the garage. The pantry is pretty small and is where we store anything that mice could potentially chew through. The garage is where we keep our jars, bottles, cans, and plastic totes. The real challenge is the garage is not climate controlled and ranges from just above freezing in the winter to over 100 degrees in the summer.
The food preservation is a 2 burner camp stove that I have set-up either in the garage or on the deck depending on how hot/cold it is when doing canning work. It’s a bit difficult to move things between the house and the stove and it requires constant set-up, tear down, and storage. The dehydrator is in the garage and that works out ok as it’s located where I can keep it set-up constantly.
After talking though it this early summer, Bridge and I decided we needed something better. We looked into root cellar ideas, there are many plans and concepts on the internet – but most of those seemed like either a hassle or really wouldn’t work with our soil / water table.
We decided to get a large Tuff-Shed and split into a large walk in cool room and a canning kitchen. The shed is a barn style 10 x 20 x 12 with a loft at one end and a large six foot double door. We got it with few bells and whistles so we could customize it ourselves depending on how we wanted the layout.
The critical thing was the ability to insulate the cool room, this won’t be a refrigerated space, but hopefully with some creativity we can get it to a constant 40-50 degree mark with moderate humidity. In the summer we will probably need to put in an air conditioner to maintain that.
Our first step was to extend the six foot loft to 8 feet and insulate the walls. We Used an R19 fiberglass insulation with a 1” foam insulation board rated at R5 – that should give us around R24/R25 with the walls and hopefully some stability in insulation.
Cheap Vinyl going in 
Had to raise the loft up for the door 
Separation of the Pantry from Kitchen 
Completed separation wall
We put down a really inexpensive vinyl floor just so it was easy to keep clean and I’ve been slowly working on getting the electrical set-up for lighting.
Our next steps is to finish the walls and ceiling in the cool room and get some shelving in place to move the food storage. Then we will tackle the canning kitchen a little later this fall when time permits.
