While I’m trying to decide whether or not to volunteer to be considered for that prepper TV pilot (upside is they appear to be a professional crew with lots of successful series under their belts; downside is that one of those series is Hoarders, and as messy as my house is at the moment they’d probably stick me in the wrong series), I figure I might as well share some of my preps.
I’ve been a prepper since I started reading Jim Rawles’ Survivalblog back in mid-2005. It’s been a long six years, but in that time I’ve managed to get fairly close to feeling good about the level of my preps, all by just trying to consistently devote a few hours and some dollars each month to building up my supplies. Consistency has been the key.
The primary place for your preparations to focus, IMHO, is your pantry. In my case, I’ve slowly built up a set of assemble-it-yourself bookshelves from sources as varied as Home Depot, Lowes and most recently IKEA. I generally bought the half-size three* four-shelf variety as I couldn’t usually afford to buy more than one at a time. Over time I bolted pairs of them together with angle irons to form full-size six* eight-shelf-tall bookcases, each mounted on casters to hopefully protect a little against The Big One here in earthquake country. I’ll post some more pics as I finish cleaning up the mess organizing and tidying my preps.
Here’s the first set of shelves, just inside our garage from the house. From top down: condiments; cooking oils and sauces; various sugars and chocolate supplies; and staples like salt, pepper, flour, and yeast and other baking stuff. Pretty basic, right?
Resting on the bottom shelf is a plastic jar of flax seed, which my environmentally-conscious daughter left behind, and which I’ve kept around because it’s a handy substitute for butter and eggs in baking. Additional prepper angle: it protects against radiation exposure. Kewl!
*Obviously one key skill for keeping track of your stored food and supplies is learning to count.