Friday, May 21, 2010
A Day in the Life of a Preparedness Nut
It finally happened. I couldn't put it off any longer. I tackled the storage room. We have a storage container that we keep everything that doesn't fit in the shouses, but needs to live somewhere dry. That includes the bulk food storage. I have been putting it off for months, mostly because I have children. Now, don't get me wrong, having children is a wonderful blessing, just not when you are dealing with a storage area that the children are the ones to consistently access. Anyway, as I said, I couldn't put it off any longer.I headed out to the container at about 9 this morning and dove in - literally. The front access was almost non-existent! I had to wade my way through to the back were the stored foods live. I thought it best to start in the back and work my way forward. My main goal was to inventory all of our stored foods, so that I knew what we had and what we were lacking. First, I cataloged all of the 4 and 5 gallon pails. I noted how many of each food we had, and how full they were. Next, I moved on to the 55 gallon barrels, then to clear storage bins, and finally to #10 tins of dehydrated foods, lard and oil. What a chore!
After I cataloged what we had, I also assessed the damaged caused by rodents on the foods that were not secured in plastic buckets, barrels or tins. Amazingly, we have very little loss, and we quickly cataloged and packaged all of the non-secure foods in 4 gallon pails. We cleared room on our racking and labeled all of the new buckets with a sharpie pen and stacked them neatly on the shelves.
When the foods had been taken care of, we started in on the toiletries and hygiene items. We also put medical and surgery equipment in 4 gallon pails. We found boxes with mantles, globes and wicks for oil and Coleman lanterns and put them in pails. I thought they would be safer in pails than in boxes, which could be damaged or soiled. All in all, we filled about 25 four gallon pails and cataloged about 150 pails and eight 55 gallon barrels.
What an eye-opener today's work was! I saw some huge gaps in our preparedness stores and a few areas that I was satisfied we were well stocked.
We will be spending the next several months really sucking our gut in, so that we are able to purchase all of the essentials we believe we will be needing. We will be trimming in the all areas possible. We are selling everything we believe to be non-essential and bulking up on necessities.
A few immediate concerns for our family are: Yeast, oils, beans, rice, cleaning supplies and detergents, medical/pharmaceuticals & reloading supplies. My plan is to store everything in 4 gallon pails, because they are easy to label and convenient to stack, besides being rodent and water proof.
We are also storing gasoline and white gas (for Coleman lanterns) and kerosene (for oil lamps). I am ordering parts to repair our Diamont Grain Grinder (hand grinder - I use my electric for daily use) and Chris is working on repairing our second power inverter.
Here we go!
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