Living in an RV with limited storage, you have to prioritize
what you have space for and what you don’t. With three growing boys, food
storage is high on our priority list. Big grocery store trips happen once a
month in order to cut down on impulse buys. Although we do have to restock on
milk, eggs, cheese and fresh fruits and vegetables at least once a week, we
stock up on dried and frozen goods so we don’t have as many trips to the grocery
store. In order to understand the food we buy, you should know something about the meals we eat. I cook two to three meals every day. Dinner is almost always home cooked, as close to from scratch as I can get it. Lunch is sometimes home cooked, sometimes “quick fix” like frozen raviolis or hot dogs and baked beans. And sometimes we have leftovers for lunch, although lately we haven’t had much leftovers as the boys eat more and more at each meal. Breakfast is home cooked at least twice a week: pancakes, waffles, biscuits, etc. The rest of the time we eat cereal, oatmeal, or peanut butter sandwiches. In between meals my kids snack, a lot. I try to keep the snacks healthy - pretzles, fruit, etc. but we also do homebaked cookies, homemade granola bars, and I have one who likes to eat up our leftovers for snacks.
For dinners, I plan out our meals 5 weeks ahead of time using a chart like this:
This helps to make sure we have variety in our meals, and I can balance how many meals we are eating that contain meat or beans or cheese or whatnot. I use the meal plan to plan my grocery list so that I'm not buying things I don't need. This saves on storage and on money! We spend about $500 a month on food.
Once I make the list, we do big grocery shopping and bring home the food to store. This was much easier when we were in a house or apartment, but we have made it work well in our RV by being creative and prioritizing food storage as needing more space than other things.
So, where do I put all of the food I buy? Well my husband has done a bunch of work to make sure that we had enough room for the amount of food we need. He has removed drawers, built shelves, added doors and more.
Here’s a peek at our food storage:
We have a regular RV fridge which holds quite a bit of food, although it's not very deep. It has a freezer attached to the top which is where we store vegetables, butter, broths and anything non-meat that needs to be stored.
My husband installed an extra mini fridge that is dedicated to meat. We fill it once a month, and usually have some meat left at the end of the month since we only eat meat two to three times a week.
Underneath the regular RV fridge, my husband removed a drawer and opened up a storage space which he just added doors too. This gives us room for potatoes, onions, cooking oil, extra boxed items and the all important wine. (We collect local wines in the different places we visit. So far Michigan held our favorite wines, but that's a whole seperate post!)
Next to the refrigerator was once a closet. When we bought the RV, my husband took out the hanging bar and added shelves, making me a pantry with three deep shelves. The shelves are so deep that we have a box in the back of the bottom one to hold canned goods.
Under the pantry was once two drawers. My husband took out the bottom drawer and realized there was a lot of extra space underneath it. So he took out some paneling and built me two additional shelves with a door. On these two deep shelves, we use large totes to store beans, four and rice. My flour and rice containers can each hold about 20 pounds of material, giving me plenty of room to stock up.
Above my stove was once a microwave. When we had been in the RV for two months we realized that we had only used the microwave one time and that it was taking up a lot of space. So my husband removed it and built doors and added an additional shelf to make more storage space. The top shelf holds canning jars and kitchen towels. The bottom shelf holds common cooking and baking needs like baking powder, yeast, powdered milk, salt and pepper.
Spices were a huge space issue for us. We tried multiple solutions and eventually my husband built me a spice cabinet with three shelves and a door. The cabinet is right next to the stove, so it is very convenient for cooking.
So that is how we store a month's worth of food in our 30 foot Class A RV with no slides. I showcased this storage in our interview and RV tour with Follow the Hearts, so feel free to check out that video too.
