Food preservation room

KevinLoving

Here is a 2 minute video I did showing off are recently completed food preservation room....

https://youtu.be/Qt6-T-Zg-5Y

Torey

@KevinLoving

This is impressive! Exactly what I would want to build for myself. I'm sure this is going to be a huge step in your food security.

Congratulations on your efforts!

KevinLoving

Thank You Torey! It was expensive and took a great deal of work but we think it will serve us for many years. The walls are covered with 1/2 inch plywood and the plywood is covered with FRP. The floor is painted epoxy. We tried to make it easy to scrub.

In times past I was employed in building several restaurants. This was very useful knowledge to me in this project.

JennyT Upstate South Carolina

@KevinLoving Wow!! I'm blown away. That's an amazing setup. 😲

We are intending to use the kitchen area in our basement as a food preservation space after the rest of our home remodel is complete. We'll have to do some reconfiguring to make it an easier space to work, it's too bad it won't be as nice as yours.😊

marjstratton

Nice!

Michelle D

@KevinLoving I love it! You did a wonderful job. It is along the same lines as I'm hoping to build for myself one day. That being said I also want a room for butchering. I currently butcher and preserve all the wild game that my husband brings home and will soon (if all goes according to plan) be doing it with ducks and chickens raised here. I don't really have a great place to do it right now. Thanks for the inspiration! I shared your video with my husband to give him a visual of the kind of thing I'm hoping for when the money becomes available.

KevinLoving

Michelle D, I am so glad you like it. If I were going to butcher in there I would have had stainless steel counter tops. The FRP (the white plastic stuff on the walls) is water proof and would work fine. You can't turn a hose on the room I built but it would not take a lot of modification to be able to wash it down with a hose. I do have a floor drain in the room and I am glad we put that in when the shop was built (at the time we thought it would be a bathroom). Material prices keep going up. I bought most of the materials before the big price increase (thank goodness). There are about 25 4x8 sheets of FRP in that room and FRP is 1/3 higher than when I bought the original load.

Tell your Husband to get ready for a LOAD of work! But my Wife LOVES it! We started loading it down yesterday with a bunch of canned goods from last years garden.

Michelle D

@KevinLoving yes, stainless will be a must! It is a lot of work moving all the full canning jars! I know from experience this week. There is a storage room in our basement that stay very cool all year. I have wanted to make it a pantry/root cellar for awhile now. I was gifted most of the supplies that I needed to make happen for Christmas. It took a lot of work but I finished it and moved everything in this week. I have some empty shelves that will be perfect for storing root crops, winter squash, etc when I harvest this year. So exciting!

LaurieLovesLearning

@KevinLoving Your room looks well thought out with a good floor plan for efficient movement for its purposes. Nice work.

gardneto76

I love this idea. My freeze dryer is set up in my craft room. It is the best space we have available for it right now. I have slowly been working around the freeze dryer area, getting it cleaned up and more user friendly for the space. We do have to be creative sometimes. My, now adult, daughters left a drawing desk in there, so it has recently cleared off and set up so I can use it as counter space when removing trays from the dryer. I also have jars under it and packaging supplies close by. It really makes it nice when things are conveniently located.

water2world

@KevinLoving WOW!!! Very impressive! I love all the thought and detail that went into making this a perfect room!

Linda Bittle

Love it!

I agree that a place to butcher animals would be nice. I'd probably (dreaming here) make a side room with that area, stainless, with floor drain. Dad worked in a dairy barn when I was small. Loved that you could just hose everything down with disinfectant and hot water when you were done!

And an additional "still room" would be ideal...for making those herbal products...and perhaps a little moonshine?

I can see how an entire basement could be purposed like this! Dream big, I always say. If the kitchen part is commercial, you could make and sell things, too. Nice side business, I think.

And classes in canning, baking, dehydrating, freeze drying...hire out to others to process their garden produce...

Torey

I was thinking an outdoor screened in room would be excellent for hanging & butchering but even better if you could have the butchering equipment inside. And if we are dreaming big, then a walk-in cooler, too. I think the CoolBots would work well to transform a room.

I hadn't considered a "still room". I have what would be considered an old fashioned still room for herbs but to think of this literally, then it would be nice to have a brew room for a few carboys of wine and cider (my husband would want beer, too) and a still. Not that I would use it to produce any illegal products, of course. 🤣 It could be right off the food prep room so as to have access to a sink.

JodieDownUnder

@KevinLoving Loving your food preservation room. Work space, shelving, 6 burner gas stove, etc great job.

JennyT Upstate South Carolina

https://community.thegrownetwork.com/discussion/comment/908876#Comment_908876

Wow! I'd love to see what all of the "big dream" would look like laid out in actual plans. It sounds amazing, @torey.😁

vickeym

Very impressed and very jealous! We hope to build a set up like this someday.