This Weekend's Task: Home Repairs

Are there any home repairs you have been putting off lately?  Have you done a walk-thru of your home lately in order to list anything that is broken or in need of repair?  This may be a good weekend to do so.
The purpose of this task is three-fold.  First, being able to do simple home repairs is a prepper task that everyone should have some practice with.  Second, you want your house to be as safe as possible and with shaky deck railing, burned out lights, and carpet that is sticking up in places...that doesn't make for a safe home.  Third, by doing your own home repairs you can save A LOT of money.  Here's some rules:

• Start small.  Changing out a non-working light switch is a very simple task (if you don't know how to do this simply Google for YouTube videos to show you how it is done.  Also, turn off the power first), whereas replacing your septic tank will take a bit (er, a lot) more skill.
• Have the right tools.  If you have no tools and very little money, you can round up some basic tools at the $1 store.  These obviously aren't great tools and I wouldn't buy more than a hammer, screwdriver, and pair of pliers there but these items will get you started.  As soon as possible you will want to upgrade the quality and quantity of your tools (I prefer Craftsman) which can be done relatively cheaply (garage sales, thrift stores) or more expensively (at retail stores).
• Take safety precautions.  In construction shortcuts can literally get you killed.  Small home repairs are less likely to get you killed (be very careful of any work that involves your roof) but you don't want to get a household-sized jolt of electricity because you thought it would be quicker to replace the ceiling fan without shutting off the power first.
• Get the family involved.  The whole family should help you hunt for things that need to be repaired in your house (it's amazing what kids can see at eye-level).
• Call in help.  If you find yourself in over your head (it's happened to me a couple of times) call for reinforcements (which would ideally be a neighbor or brother-in-law you can pay with a case of beer, otherwise you may need to call a professional). 
• If your home is in excellent shape and needs no home repairs you can always consider doing small home improvement projects to up your skills (install shower doors and ceiling fans, maybe build a deck).
• Hang out with friends who are doing home repair or improvement projects and offer to help out.  This way you will be learning by doing, hopefully under the guidance of someone who is more skilled than you are.
• Teach your kids how to do home repairs.  This is probably one of the best set of skills I instilled in the kids who all ended up doing construction jobs during college simply because they had the knowledge and background to get them employed in this field.
• The next time something in your home breaks down make your first though "how can I fix this?" not "who can I call?".  Note, this can occasionally make the spouse a bit nervous.

Your Bug Out Bag

A very simple, quite useful, and pretty inexpensive prepper task you can do this weekend is to build your bug out bag.  Many people think you need a bug out bag (BOB) for the time that TEOTWAWKI hits your area and you need to grab your bag and run, maybe quite literally, out of town.  The number of times this has actually happened to people?  Probably less than 1%.  More common reasons you will need your bug out bag?

• A loved one is in a severe car accident and has been taken to the trauma center two hours from your house.  Grab bag and go.
• There is a hostage situation/chemical spill/wildfire heading your way and law enforcement is going door to door telling you to evacuate the area immediately for an indeterminate amount of time.  Grab bag and go.
• You've been out late--too late-- and don't want to drive another two hours to get home.  Grab car bag and set up camp.
• A reality show host, complete with cameras, descends on your doorstep and will offer you a million dollars if you leave with them this minute and complete some sort of multi-country scavenger hunt.  Not likely to happen, of course, but grab bag and go anyway.

So even though you probably won't need your BOB to literally bug out, you still should have a bag at the ready for those rare-but-still-likely-to-happen-sometime-in-your-lifetime events which require you to immediately leave your home and set up shop (or a home base) elsewhere.  Here's what you need:

• A backpack (these are easiest to carry)
• Shoes (good, sturdy, walking shoes)
• Two pairs of socks
• Underwear
• Pair of pants
• T shirt
• Long sleeve shirt
• Fleece jacket
• Rain shell
• Gloves and hat
• Toiletry kit (soap, razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, floss, comb, sunscreen, tweezers, condoms, feminine hygiene, etc)
• Vitamins, prescription medications
• Mini first aid kit (bandaids, alcohol wipes, antibacterial ointment, etc)
• Washcloth and chamois towel
• Dr Bonners soap
• Toilet paper, packets of tissues, wet wipes
• Shelter (tent, bivy sack, or tarp with guy lines and stakes)
• Sleeping bag, sleeping pad
• Stove, fuel, mess kit, utensils, 
• Matches, lighter, fire steel
• Bottles of water (or filled bladder, etc)
• Food (a week's worth of backpacking type food)
• Plastic bags: large garbage bag, 13 gallon garbage bag, ziploc bags
• Water purification system (Aqua Mira, Sawyer Squeeze, etc)
• Bandanna
• Repair items: duct tape, paracord, sewing kit
• Outdoor items: compass, small plastic shovel, whistle, maps, magnifying glass
• Fishing kit, snare wire
• Larger knife for protection/dressing an animal and a pocket knife
• Pens, notebook, playing cards
• Passport, copy of important documents (driver's license, insurance cards, etc)
• Wallet/cash/credit cards/etc
• Sunglasses
• Flashlight or headlamp with extra batteries
• Cell phone with charger
• Laptop or tablet with charger
• Handcrank radio with charger outlet
• Protection: firearm and ammo, pepper spray, etc

Those are the basics.  It is a good idea to build your BOB then take it up to the mountains overnight and see what happens.  This is a quick way to find out if your BOB is complete, what items you don't really need and what items you didn't have but should definitely add.  Keeping your BOB updated and continuing to add items as you can afford them (ie: start with a big, el cheapo sleeping bag then switch to an ultra lightweight, high tech sleeping bag when you have the money) is also a good idea.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Post for Two Important Messages

Today's post was going to be about bug out bags but I figured these two messages were more important so bug out bags will be our next post (pending a catastrophic meltdown of our government/economy/etc):

Message #1:  I was thinking "this is a preparedness blog, shouldn't I jump into the fray surrounding the government shutdown?".  And then I thought no, because #1, preparedness is a daily type activity that should go on regardless of what is happening in our world, and #2, hyping all of the BS that is going on at the national government level is both well covered by the media ("well" meaning covered abundantly, not well as in a job well done) and useless when you have nothing solid to base your suppositions on besides what "might" happen (unfortunately most people use these guesses to terrify the public which is good for ratings but rather useless in the grand scheme of things).

Message #2:  I may not have made this clear in previous posts but whenever we talk about preparedness stuff, I want to encourage you to use what you have and what you can afford.  Preparedness rarely means you need to go out and leverage yourself to the hilt to buy the "right" gear.  If you have all kinds of money laying around, then by all means, spend it how you wish and if you wish to lay waste to your nearest REI in order to make yourself look like a Nat Geo explorer, then by all means do so.  On the other hand, if all you can afford is a Dollar Store flashlight, I would much rather you spend that $1 on a flashlight for use in an emergency situation rather than #1, put yourself into debt to buy a $250 Surefire Defender Ultra flashlight, or #2, not buy any flashlight at all if you can't buy the best (which is just dumb).  Also, any time you think "I need to go buy fill in the blank", remember that your ancestors accomplished the same thing you are trying to accomplish with a whole lot less stuff, no high tech microfibers or titanium, and a whole lot less money than you probably have in your pocket.  Be creative, use what you have, hit up the thrift stores, barter for what you need, and, maybe more importantly, greatly reduce the amount of things you think you must have to survive and then spend the rest of your time and money enjoying your life as it is now.

...back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Stockpiling Food and Water

One of the basics of being a prepper is storing extra food and water for use in the event of an emergency.  Although the term "stockpiling" sounds very survivalist-y, fifty years ago, keeping essential items in reserve was just common sense.
My grandparents had a well back then but they also kept cisterns with water (they had cattle to water, what if the well went dry?) and had irrigation water separate from their household supply.  Triple redundancy was a good thing.  Ditto for food reserves (back then your typical farm family did everything from growing their own vegetables to smoking and curing meat to making jam and preserves with the regularity of the seasons.  These days many people can hardly feed themselves for a week with what they keep in their pantry.
If you are thinking "well that was back then, there is food on every corner these days" consider that boil water orders are issued quite frequently, massive winter storms can strand you at home for days on end, and something like Super Storm Sandy can wipe out every food supply source for miles around.
So now that we are clear that a disaster can happen and you may be responsible for keeping yourself fed and watered for a week or longer, the idea, when beginning to stockpile food and water, is to start small.  Do you have enough extra water on hand to keep you and your family hydrated, clean, and fed for a week?  A month?  Six months?  Do you have enough enough food (meaning ALL the food you would need so you wouldn't need to go to ANY store) on hand to feed yourself and your family for a week?  A month?  Six months?
If you have enough food and water on hand for an entire week, you will be miles ahead of the general population.  If you have enough food and water on hand for a month you will be in very rare company. Here are some things to consider when starting your stockpile:

• Consider storage space (in the basement, in the attic, under beds, in the pantry, in the garage, etc).
• Consider storage location (extreme heat/cold, dampness, light, etc. can deteriorate your stores very quickly so locating your stockpile in a cool, dry, dark place is optimal).
• Consider how you will rotate your food (we used to try to rotate our stored food with our regular food but it was a big hassle so every four months we would use up a quarter of our stores by having a party or donating the oldest quarter of our food then restocking).
• Consider your needs (when we had a house full of kids and worked with various community service agencies that could always use donations we stocked A LOT of food.  Now that there is just the two of us--and we eat out quite a bit--we store considerably less food so it won't go to waste or spoil).  We still have enough to hold us over for a months-long quarantine if necessary but it won't be nearly as lavish as it used to be (think rice and beans, canned meat and peanut butter...boring but calorie dense).
• Consider your finances (you don't want to deprive yourself now just to have a garage full of food.  What you want to do is pick up a hand full of extra loss leaders or a case of corn/etc when it is on a good sale and slowly add to your stores).
• Consider your specific situation (we live in a desert which means storing lots of extra water, it also means we can grow everything from sprouts to a good supply of vegetables nearly year round).
• Consider what would happen if you really were stranded at home for a month with no food or water available (in a disaster you may not have enough water or fuel to boil dried beans so canned beans may be a better option; during times when everyone in the house gets the flu at once canned soup is a lifesaver).
• Consider what you eat when you go backpacking (these are foods that are small to store, easy to carry, don't need to be refrigerated, and have a long shelf life).  On the other hand, pop tarts and Twinkies fit this description but you also want to retain some semblance of health so better food choices should be made.
• Consider that the more fresh food you can get into your diet the better (preserved foods are usually loaded with salt and chemicals; eating cattails and dandelion greens should be considered)
• Don't forget comfort foods and treats.  I learned this many years ago from a very tough old woman who was running a large-scale community disaster drill like her life depended on it.  When she handed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I idly commented that she had the resources to have the event catered by the best restaurants in the city and she stated that during a disaster people don't want Chateaubriand they want comfort food, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I ate the sandwich.  Then she gave me cookies and told me people also like treats when a disaster strikes.  I believed her.

Here's some ideas to get you started:

• Cases of bottled water
• A big tub of old fashioned oats
• A box of powdered milk
• A can of coffee
• Instant hot chocolate
• Granola bars
• Big jar of peanut butter
• Dried fruit (raisins, apricots, cranberries, etc)
• Cans of soup
• Cans of spaghetti sauce
• Dried pasta
• Rice
• Canned meat (tuna, chicken, sardines, Spam, etc)
• Smoked/cured meat (salami, smoked salmon, etc)
• Spices (salt, pepper, garlic powder, curry, etc)
• Baking supplies (flour, sugar, salt, oil, leavener, vanilla, etc)
• Parmesan cheese
• Packaged mixes (mac and cheese, gravy mix, noodle side dishes, etc)
• Canned nuts
• Instant drink mix powders
• Beef jerky
• Candy bars
• Crackers
• Canned cheese
• Canned beans
• Canned tomatoes
• Canned/dried vegetables

Prepare for Civil Unrest

Not that it will come to it (hopefully) but if things start spiraling downhill (ie: the government shutdown and the debt ceiling lead to an impasse for an extended length of time causing people who rely on the government for their income to stop receiving said income which then leads to a financial death spiral that affects the entire community/county/state/country) things could get dicey.
We haven't seen civil unrest in the US, the likes of which other people in the world have experienced (Argentina, Bosnia, and Russia come to mind) but there is always the possibility that such a calamity could occur.  Unfortunately such a thing could happen sooner rather than later so beginning to prepare right now will probably be of little help (we are talking within weeks which greatly limits what you can do to prepare as opposed to having a year or more to get ready) but you should at least be familiar with the kinds of things that could happen when the bottom drops out of your/your country's finances.  Read these:

• Surviving a SHTF experience in Bosnia
• 25 things you should do to prepare for an economic collapse
• Prepare for an economic collapse
• Prepper tips for the coming economic collapse (a huge list of links)
• Surviving economic collapse tips and gear
• How to survive the economic collapse

What you shouldn't do:

• Panic
• Cash out the kids college fund and go on a shopping spree
• Put your head in the sand and pretend like nothing bad can happen because this is America
• Stockpile only gold (or silver or firearms or any other single item)
• Believe everything you hear on TV (this will either make you terrified or stupefied)
• Ready/watch or otherwise ingest the news 24/7 (this will make you depressed)
• Stop living your regular life and becoming a super survivalist which scares both the neighbors and your spouse

What you should do (ie: common sense things that won't hurt you if such dire predictions don't come to pass  but which could greatly help you if the alternative happens):

• Get 90 day prescriptions for your medications instead of 30 day prescriptions.
• Skip the $50 dinner out and buy a 50 pound bag of rice, some canned meat, and a few loss leader gallons of milk (actually buy the food you would regularly eat but buy enough to hold you over for an extra week/month/year...this is a slow process, building up a stockpile of food)
• Instead of going shopping at the mall this week, hit up the Goodwill or other thrift stores instead.  If you usually spend $200 on stuff at the mall (which equates to a pair of shoes and a pair of pants), spend that $200 at the thrift store and buy useful stuff (some cold weather gear, tools, etc). 
• Take the family backpacking for the weekend (you will see how very little you actually need to survive...and the kids will think it's an adventure).
• Do some recon: where are your local water sources?  How long does it take you to walk into town?  What can you learn online that would help you in the event of a disaster (ideas here, here, and here)?  Take a walk around your neighborhood and see what you can find (birds nests, wild animals, fish, edible plants, hidden pathways, etc). 
• Do those repairs you have been putting off around the house (mend the fence, reinforce the window locks, set up the closed circuit camera system that has been gathering dust in the garage, etc).
• Go hunting or fishing or crabbing or what ever food-acquiring season it is where you live (this is mostly for fun, to get away from all of the doom and gloom news on TV, to brush up your food-acquiring skills, and to give you some meat to put up in your freezer).
• Do an inventory of your home and make a shopping list.  Low on razors/toilet paper/batteries?  Write these things down for your next shopping trip.  Have a hundred cans of beans and no cans of tomatoes?  Put tomatoes on your list.  Rarely ever use baking powder?  A new can might be in order.
• Work on your side business.  Hopefully your side business will be less on the artsy side (not a bad thing but not a necessity in a SHTF scenario) and more on the technical side (people NEED certain things like their car to run, food, and their plumbing fixed when TSHTF...concentrate on these things).

The Government Shutdown

Well now that we are in to day two of the government shutdown, what are the lessons we can take away from this?

• There's very little you can do when it comes to the government.  Yes you can call your congressman, yes you can stick to CNN like it is your lifeline and become more depressed by the hour, yes you can rant on online forums.  None of that will do much good.
• This is why you should vote.
• This is also why you should have both a fat and fluffy emergency fund and be debt free.
• And why (especially in this instance if you are a government employee) you should have multiple streams of income.
• Plus this is yet another example of why you can't depend on anyone other than yourself (your job, your income, your government military pension...all shot to hell at the whim of your elected governing officials).
• Although unlikely, if this shutdown goes on for more than a month, you will see civil unrest (are you prepared for such an event?)

tldr; no matter what is happening in in the world at large, YOU are responsible for yourself which is why preparedness is so freaking important.  You need to be prepared for anything anyone can throw at you.  You need to prepare now.