When food shortages come, and you can be sure that they are going to come, FEMA has the authority to take control of all food supplies and distribute them to the needy.

You may be one of the lucky ones who gets overlooked in their search for food, but I doubt that there will be any of us who escape their search for guns.

I’m sure that when that executive order was signed, it was with the intention that they could seize stocks in warehouses, so that they would have food to distribute in the case of an emergency. However, like any law or regulation, if there is a way to misuse the authority, someone will eventually do so.

Since there is no limitation on that executive order, FEMA also has the right to enter your home and my home, stealing our food stockpiles for “distribution” to those in need. In other words, they have the authority for redistribution of wealth.

So the question is, what are you going to do when FEMA shows up at your door to take your guns and food? Better yet, what are you going to do beforehand?

Keep reading to find out the tricks of winning when playing hide and seek with FEMA guys.

Find out more on how to improve your home defense to survive disaster! 

Tricks for Playing Hide-and-Seek with FEMA

The only way you can keep your food and firearms is to make sure that they can’t find them. Any home has a myriad of potential hiding places that will at least suffice for an initial search of your home.

For this, we’re going to depend upon a little bit of psychology. Whoever ends up doing the searching is probably going to have a long list of houses to search. While they may do a thorough job on the first two or three houses they search, the more searches they do, the lazier they will get.

The flip side of that coin is that the more searches they do, the better they will get at doing it. So, while you need to hide things, you need to be sure that they aren’t hidden in places which are common or obvious. So, hiding things under the bed or in the bottom of a dresser drawer are probably out.

There are two basic types of searchers; either they’re searching your home because they’re searching everyone’s home, or they are searching your home because they have a tip that you have something worth seizing. Either way, the searchers are expecting to find something.

Give Them Something to Find

You can play a very effective trick on them by making them think they are smart. Everyone loves to feel like they are smarter than the average bear, so let them think that they are smarter than you. All you have to do to accomplish this is give them something to find. Once they find it, they’ll be convinced of their prowess in defeating you and probably go away happy.

Of course, you don’t want them to get everything, so you need to be careful about how you do this. If it is out in the open, they won’t think they’ve found anything. On the other hand, you don’t want it so well hidden that they end up finding the rest of your stash while looking for it. So, pick a place with that in mind and make it look like a poor concealment job, while everything else is well hidden.

Have enough in this decoy stash to make them think that they’ve found your main stash. They’re not going to go away if they think that you’re pulling the wool over their eyes, so build your decoy stash with enough food to look like it is your main supply. Just make sure that it is inexpensive enough food that losing it doesn’t hurt you that much. Never put anything critical in this stash.

Guns have to be treated differently. You don’t want them to find any of your hidden guns. On the other hand, if they come asking for your guns, they’re probably going to have a pretty good idea of what you have. Even though the law says that the federal government can’t build a database of gun ownership, you can be sure that they have one.

So, when they come asking for your guns, make sure that you have enough guns to give them, so that they think they’ve gotten them all. You can explain away a few guns that are missing by saying you sold them; but you can’t do that with everything.

Of course, if you have guns that are “off the books” because you inherited them or you bought them privately, that’s not going to be a problem. You could always give them the ones that you bought from where you had to fill out the paperwork, and keep the privately purchased ones hidden in your stash, where they don’t know about it.

Be careful about this and think it through well. You need to have your story well planned, so that you know what you are going to say when they show up. You also need to watch out for ammunition. If you tell them you’ve sold your M1911 A1, but still have 500 rounds of .45 ammo, they’re not going to believe you. Everything has to match up with your story.

16 Places to Safely Hide Your Stash

Instead of finding one area to put everything (which is more obvious and easy to find) you’re going to be better off with a few small hiding places. If they do find one of your small hiding places, the rest of them may still manage to escape detection.

The best possible hiding places are those that are totally sealed off, denying anyone access to them: buried in the garden, inside the walls, or hidden rooms. While this means that you won’t have access to them on a regular basis, you will always be able to get to them in case of emergency.

Attics and basements are the first to be searched, but they still offer a plethora of useful hiding spaces disguised as other things:

False Ductwork

If your home is heated by forced-air heating, you can easily add some false ductwork to hide things in. Use the same type of ductwork as the existing and connect it to the ductwork that is already there; however, it doesn’t have to be open to the existing ductwork for air to pass through. Most people don’t know enough about HVAC systems to tell that you’ve added ductwork.

False Drain Pipes

Toilet drains are four inch PVC pipe. Like HVAC ductwork, most people don’t know enough to tell if it is real or fake. You can add additional drain pipes that go from ceiling to floor, without connecting them to the home’s existing plumbing. You will need a flange at both ends to hold it in place.

Above Basement Ceilings

Most people use suspended acoustical ceilings when they finish their basements. If you have this, you can remove the ceiling tiles and attach shelves to the sides of the joists to store things on. With the tiles in place, you can’t tell they are there.

Below Attic Floors

Most people’s attics aren’t finished in any way. If you add a plywood floor to part of your attic, you can store lightweight items under it. Please note that those things will only be supported by drywall, so you don’t want a lot of weight.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The typical attic or basement is at least partially filled with boxes of grandma’s old quilt and baby clothes that you’ll never use. You can store some of your stockpile in these boxes, below the existing items. Just make sure that the boxes that have your stockpile in them are not easy to get to.

Video first seen on HouseholdHacker.

Inside Other Items

If you have unused furniture, kids toys or any other large items in your attic or basement, you can always hide something inside them.

The main living area of your home offers a number of possibilities as well, although things may not be quite as well hidden or as hard to find:

False Heat Registers and Electrical Outlets

It’s easy to add false heat registers and electrical outlets into walls. All you need to do is to cut a hole and mount them with the included screws. Since the inside of the wall is hollow, you have room to store whatever you want. Just be careful to place the outlets and registers in places that look like they belong. Behind furniture works extremely well. 

Under the Stairs

Many two story homes have a closet or other storage space under the stairs. However, this usually doesn’t use all the space, but only the space that is high enough for a closet. You can open up the lower part, fill it with food and put a piece of drywall over it to cover it. This drywall doesn’t even need to be well finished, as it will be hidden.

Inside the Washer and Dryer

Washing machines and dryers have extra space inside the cabinet, which is not taken up by the drum and mechanism. You can use this space to store food, as long as you make sure that it won’t interfere with the movement of the mechanism.

Inside Furniture

Most furniture has some wasted space in it. Dressers will have wasted space at the bottom. Sofas have wasted space under the cushions and in the back. The space in the bottom of a dresser can be accessed by removing the bottom drawer. To access the dead space in a sofa or upholstered chair requires removing the dust cover on the bottom. Likewise, the box springs for a bed has a lot of dead space, which is only covered by a thin dust cover. Remove the cover, build a place to store food and put the cover back on.

Bathroom Cabinets

The drawer front on a bathroom cabinet or kitchen sink cabinet is false, only there for appearances. There isn’t enough room for a drawer there. However, there is a small amount of room between that drawer front and the sink. A small shelf can be installed there to store things.

Above Closet Doors

Most homes have closets with bifold or sliding doors. People rarely look up when they look in those closets. A shelf can be mounted above the door, inside the closet and things stored there. While it plain sight, few searchers will see it.

Under the Floor

A small storage area can be made by peeling up a corner of the carpet and cutting a trap door in the floor. This works best when a piece of furniture, such as an end table, will be sitting over that corner, keeping the carpet in place.

The soffit over kitchen cabinets

Many kitchens have a built-in soffit over the kitchen wall cabinets. This is dead space, built more for decorative purposes than any other reason. A hole can be made in the soffit and it can be filled with food or other items. The hole can be closed by installing a heat register, making it look like the soffit is part of the HVAC system.

The Toe Kick under the Kitchen and Bathroom Base Cabinets

It hides about four inches of dead space, all the way to the back of the cabinet. This can be removed and reinstalled with spring catches.

Eaves

If your home has two stories with dormers, there is a considerable amount of dead space in the eaves. The only problem is installing a hidden access to the eaves. You will also need to floor over the joists, as the only existing floor is the drywall to the ceiling of the rooms below.

Video first seen on JLaservideo.

The Secrets of Burial Vaults for Storage

If you are going to bury anything in your back yard, you need to make sure that it is well sealed to protect it from moisture. Most containers, even plastic bins, don’t offer this type of protection. However, it’s really not all that hard to protect them.

The easiest way to protect things you want to bury underground is to buy a bunch of five gallon buckets with lids. Try to buy the kind that doesn’t have a bung in the lid (opening for pouring out of), as these will seal better. Also check to make sure that the lid has a rubber seal in the groove that snaps onto the bucket. Without this seal, the bucket is not moisture proof. Take heed, not all have this seal. Be sure to use new lids, as they will seal better.

Another way you can make storage vaults is with four inch PVC pipe. You can either glue the caps on the ends or glue a cap on one end, with a screw-on cap on the other. I prefer the glue-on cap, as the screw on ones can be as hard to remove as the glue on ones are. This isn’t the type of container that you’re going to be opening regularly, so you don’t really need that screw-on lid. Just be sure that you have a few saws hidden in different places to get the caps off with.

One nice thing about using PVC pipe to make storage vaults is that you can easily make holes in the ground to hide them with a standard post-hole digger. Burying five gallon buckets requires a bit bigger hole. If you have hard ground, you might have trouble burying them.

Make sure that you clearly define the location of your buried vaults in some secret way that only you will know. Use more than one point of reference, as your favorite tree may die, eliminating it as a point of reference.

As you can see, the list is nearly endless. Use your imagination and seek out all the unused areas of your home. Look at things to compare the usable space inside to the physical space it takes up. For example, when you look at a dresser, you see that the drawers aren’t as wide as the cabinet. That means there is space on either side of the drawers; space that you can use to hide something.

You are the one who’s able to find the best hiding places in your home, you just need to keep in mind the tricks for a good hiding place.

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This article has been written by John Gilmore for Survivopedia.