Okay, so it's essentially a special-purpose basement. Now, if you intend to use it as such, you need to stock it. Which doesn't require loading it all at once, you just add, say, $10 or $20 a week to your purchases, and hit the dollar stores. Thus you use this place as a kind of stockroom.Flack wrote: I have never owned a home with a storm shelter before and have lived in tornado alley all my life, so I doubt I will ever get inside this one. But it makes the wife and kids feel safer.
http://www.groundzeroshelters.com/flattop.html
Figure enough supplies for twice your family for three days to a week. Nothing requiring refrigeration and stuff that has longer shelf lives, canned goods and such. Bottled water, for drinking. Possibly some sort of camp stove for hot food, If you never use this stuff it's a cheap insurance policy, and one thing you do is you rotate fresh stuff in, say on a weekly or monthly basis, and the stuff that was in the shelter comes out into the regular pantry.
You don't buy $3.50 a 4-package toilet paper at Target, you buy the $1 for 4 at the dollar store. You put up some paper towels but I'd recommend shop towels, they're only a little more expensive than paper but much stronger. Home Depot has them.
So let's say your family is four people, figuring 3 meals a day for 8 people (you may pick up strays like your neighbors visit or one of your kid's friends is visiting and it becomes too dangerous for him to go home). 24x7 is 200 meals, or perhaps 8 cases of food: chili, beef stew, soup, ramen, and other canned goods. It's a survival resource and since you can simply recycle stuff into your regular meals it's just a slight expense. $20 a week extra over a couple of months is less than $200, then it's self-fulfilling since the new stuff you buy goes into storage, and the stuff you put into storage last week or last month comes out for use.
Food, water, a first-aid kit, a couple of buckets (one to use for washing and one as a latrine, or you can buy a portable toilet). If you're overprepared it's simply a few dollars wasted, if you get in trouble and don't have what you need it can be horrible to a disaster.
If things get really bad, you might not get help for several days and thus you're self-dependent for at least a week. But don't tell your neighbors or anyone who doesn't need to know that you have extra supplies, in small towns it might not be a problem but in larger ones, if civilization breaks down it becomes a target for looters, if it gets around "Hey, there's food in a bunker at 11438 Your Address Road, let's go get it!"
Also, if you have guns it's not a bad place to store the extra ones as opposed to an expensive gun safe or gun locker. My then-girlfriend's family kept their shotguns and rifles in a locked glass case in one of the bedrooms. But if you have them for home defense (as opposed to just hunting or target practice) you still want the usual ones in the appropriate easy-to-reach places.
