Note: This is an update of a 2014 post from Trish — who still uses pegboards for stockpile organization! 🙂

Have you ever thought about how to use pegboards for stockpile organization? This is such a great way to free up shelf space and find products easily, because so many items have handy built-in hangers for display in store that you can just as easily make use of at home. Pegboards are also helpful for storing small or awkwardly shaped health and beauty items that don’t always lend themselves well to being stored on shelves.

So, this week I’d like to share some ideas for organizing your stockpile — using pegboards and more!

Pegboards for Stockpile Organization are Awesome!

This might be an obvious solution to some of you, but I was a novice at both couponing and stockpiling when I began the search for stockpile storage. Here I have to credit a former owner of my house, who was most likely using these pegboards in the basement way back when to store tools and such.

Above, the orginal wall of a weird room at the end of my basement. We discovered this pegboard after spending the better part of a day removing the previous owners’ home improvement junk from the tiny room. I looked at this, and a light bulb immediately went off in my head: This is how they store the smaller HBA products in stores!

So (once we dealt with the condition the room was in), we decided to also line the remaining available walls with pegboard. I bought my pegboard at my local hardware store, where they were happy to cut the big sheet to fit all the odd-sized bits of walls I had to cover. They were also nice enough to cut the 1″×2″ sticks we needed to secure the sheets to the wall while, leaving enough space for the pegs to fit in. Finally, I hit up Menards for reasonably priced pegs of varying sizes.

These stockpile pegboards work for food and non-food items alike!

A larger stockpile storage solution

We all have living spaces with their own quirks and limitations, and it’s always useful to think creatively about how to make the best use of what we have. My main issue with storage space in my own home is that my kitchen storage is extremely limited: I have just enough cabinets for dishes and cooking stuff, with a TINY closet left open for food. This closet does have floor-to-ceiling shelves, but is a whopping one foot wide! Needless to say, I was compelled to look for some overflow space.

I have seen many options for stockpile locations:

• garages
• under beds
• laundry room shelves
• closets in various parts of the house

It all depends on what you have to work with. I am fortunate that I have a basement, but also that it is unfinished and therefore available to store my stockpile.

My Stockpile Storage Solution

I started out using wire racks set up in my  100 year-old house’s unfinished basement. These and other types of shelving units can be great solutions. They worked well enough for us at the beginning, but I found that some things just don’t sit well on wire. (My basement floor is also not the least bit even, so things were always falling to the floor.)

Enter: The scary little room. I wish I had more before pictures, but here the photo below will give you an idea of what this room looked like before we tackled the stockpile project:

Scary, right? And this is after we removed all of the scrap wood, other junk, and SPIDERS from the room and put the first coat of primer on the shelves. (Fortunately, the water issue is decades old and has been resolved, but the concrete in the corner still showed evidence of it.)

So we started by cleaning everything well with soap, as it wasn’t just moldy, but really dusty and dirty as well. Then. we cleaned from top to bottom with a bleach solution.

Then we primed the floor, existing shelves, and concrete lower walls with Kilz primer. Finally, we painted everything and began loading up the shelves and pegboard.

This is what the stockpile looked like when we finally were able to move everything in, plus the pegboard across the top to hold smaller items. As you might guess, that was a long time ago. This is a throwback to winter and early spring 2012: very cheap Grande chips, free Ronzoni Garden Delight, moneymaking Kikkoman panko, and free Nivea body wash. Ahh, the memories…

The Evolution of Stockpiling

Everything evolves… Since those old days, Dominick’s has closed, Jewel has changed ownership (resulting in significantly less exciting sales), and Walgreens has changed its whole system. (I have also realized that veggie pasta gives me heartburn, my husband does not eat instant oatmeal the way he used to, and we almost never drink soda anymore.)

Fast-forward to the present day. As I now have a smaller stockpile in general, my paper products have moved into the scary little stockpile room from another part of the basement, Kellogg’s Family Rewards has helped me keep up with my husband’s Frosted Mini-Wheats habit, and I have to keep us stocked on juice boxes for when it is our turn to bring snack to school. But, we still love those croutons!

I try to keep things put away (but I will confess to quickly emptying a few bags that were sitting in the middle of the floor before I took these pictures today), and the specific ways the space is used shift based on what we have in the stockpile at any given time.

More Stockpile Storage tips?

I would LOVE to hear your favorite tips for organizing your stockpile, whether you have a lot of space or a little. For more tips, see also:

• Using shoe storage pouches for stockpile organization
• Five tips for pantry organization
• Upright drawer organization

Please share your tips here!

More Frugal Homemade Ideas?

If you’re looking for more “frugal homemade” ideas, read more here:

• Frugal Homemade
• Make It or Buy It?
• Sunday Scratchups

Anything else you’d like to see covered in these categories? Comment here!