I had been contemplating living on my home store for 30 days since last October. With the holidays around the corner I thought better of the idea. I considered January to do this challenge but with a vacation planned to Florida and then babysitting my nephew for a week after, January was shot. Plus my son has a birthday in January and I didn’t want him to have to have a food storage birthday cake. (Which would have been awesome, of course!) Holidays are over, vacation was wonderful, my sweet little nephew is back with his mom and dad, and my son is now 9 years old! I am out of excuses of why I can’t live on my home store for 30 days.

Home store: “Its a space in your home where you have all the food your family eats, so you don’t have to run to the grocery store anytime you are out of eggs, milk, mushrooms, onion, cheese, or anything else you need for the recipe you are fixing at the moment.” It can be a large pantry, or closet, a room in the basement, or under several beds. A home store can be tucked away anywhere in your house. I have a cold storage room beneath my garage. That’s where my home store is.

I have not shopped at the grocery store since Saturday January 26, 2013. I was there just to pick up a few basics, not to do a huge shopping trip. To the left is a photo of inside my refridgerator so you can see that it was not at all stocked before this challenged began.

Honestly I was feeling some major anxiety about relying solely on my home store for a whole month. Because it means my days will be filled with cooking everything from scratch! And cleaning and cooking and cleaning and cooking. Will I have time to do anything else? We will see. I want this to be a good experience for my children so I have done some planning for breakfasts and dinners, but I am not sure about lunches.

I decided to set some ground rules for my challenge:

1. We can use anything that is currently in our refridgerator or freezer.

2. We have a our milk delivered to us every Monday by Rosehill Dairy. I will continue the milk delivery, but not add any other groceries to the deliveries. Sometimes I have Rosehill leave cheese, cream, eggs, bread, or juice along with the milk delivery. Did you know I love having milk delivered to my door? I do. During this challenge I can only have my milk delivered.

3. My Thrive Q will come in February. It is my qualifier to receive my commission check from Shelf Reliance, and like my milk man, I love groceries delivered to my door. Thrive is groceries to my door. My daughter is already requesting Thrive freeze dried grapes in February’s Q. The grapes are like candy!

4. My children’s lunch accounts at school are loaded with money so they can get school lunch if they don’t want to bring a lunch from home. Normally my kids prefer to bring home lunch, but living solely on food storage? I am not sure. So I put enough lunch money in all of their accounts for them to buy school lunch everyday if they want. It will be interesting to see how this part of living from of our homestore plays out.

5. We are water snobs. I know this can be an issue in an emergency with water shortages and bad tasting water. You should see all of the filters I have on hand. But since this is not a water exercise, I am going to still fill my 5 gallon water jugs at the water filter machine at the grocery store.

Those are the rules and I am keeping them all month long. My son is the pickiest of all my children. I asked him if he would be willing to at least try all the meals I prepare this month. He didn’t promise.