"Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water." -W.C. Fields
Under-bed Water Storage
Under one bed in my home, I store food. Under the other bed in my home, I store water. This is because I was spooked after a small earthquake rattled my town on a sizzling hot day in July, making me consider how thirsty I'd be if the water lines break, which they most certainly will in the event of a "real" earthquake.
In order to have eno ifugh clearance to store 106 six-packs of bottled water under this bed, I had to get the bed boosted up onto six-inch stilts. Then, I bought a single six-pack of water every single time I entered a grocery store. I don't generally purchase bottled water, considering it a waste of resources, but for the purposes of disaster prepardness I made an exception. These bottles are easy to share with thirsty neighbors.
Any bed is an excellent place to store lumber, so I added several layers of $1 boards I bought at the local cut-rate building supply thrift shop. If I seem a bit overly obsessed with lumber, it's because during the history of my elderly home, the windows have been broken catastrophically on three occasions: an earthquake, a hailstorm from hell, and a train wreck. I have a lot of windows, and I want to be able to cover every single one of them with tarps and boards, without having to stand in line at the lumberyard with ten thousand other people.
A layer of tarps, tarps, tarps. You can never have too many tarps. I pick them up at garage sales for a dollar or two each. I run them through the washing machine, hang them up to dry, and then store them in places like this, where they don't take up any of my living space.
At the Armageddon Inn, I'm working to be able to put up as many people as possible in the days following an earthquake or wildfire (or any other catastrophic event). I have two beds, two fold-out couches, nine camp cots, two campers, a bunch of tents, and a load of air mattresses.
The last time my town suffered from an earthquake, it was 25 degrees below zero. And it wasn't just one earthquake-- it was a series of 1,200 earthquakes over the course of six months in the middle of winter in 1935. Everybody spent the entire winter living in tents. For that reason, I'm fanatical about collecting and storing wool blankets. A couple dozen are stored here. I probably have about 100 wool blankets by now.
The finished product: A typical normal average every-day sort of bed. A dust ruffle hides the bottled water from view.