The Prepared Home

First steps towards home preparedness

The prepared home is the cornerstone of individual preparedness, and individual preparedness positions us better to participate in community preparedness.

Preparedness, like most things worth doing, is a journey and not a destination. It’s impossible to be prepared for everything. Trying to be prepared for every possible disaster and every possible situation is overwhelming and counterproductive. Yet when we take specific individual potential crises and prepare for them, we start on the path towards being prepared for all kinds of things.

For example, wildfire affects millions of people, and one of the best ways to prepare for it is to keep a go-bag packed and your vehicle with more than half a tank of gas as well as ideas of escape routes and a few communication methods like radios. This same sort of preparedness is also useful for earthquakes and some types of flooding. It’s also useful if your stalker ex-husband shows up in town.

The same applies for staying in your home. The first few steps you take to prepare for power outage, for example, are also useful for supply chain interruptions.

Preparing for “the end of the world” is a lot more daunting – and less likely to be immediately relevant – than preparing for natural disaster and other short-term crises. Yet the skills we develop preparing for disaster are exactly the kinds of skills we might hope to have if our entire ecological or economic system collapses – a terrible scenario that feels more likely every year.

What Kind of Home

First and foremost, everything is contextual. How one prepares one’s home if it’s a tent in an encampment by the river is different from how one prepares one’s apartment, is different from how one prepares a punk house rented from a slumlord, is different from an owned home in the suburbs or the countryside.

An owned, single-family home is not the gold standard for preparedness (being part of a healthy community is more important than any individual preparedness, and frankly I’d take that rented punk house crammed full of people in most situations), but it does offer the closest to a blank slate for this kind of discussion – it’s the kind of home that one has the most control over, so we can discuss the most options. Only some will apply to your specific situation.

Those who live in mobile or temporary homes (such as tents or backpacks) might need to – and have experience – relying more on their skills and their communities than on stockpiled resources. 

Those who live in small spaces might have to get inventive with how to store food and water or other supplies and are more likely to have to limit the quantities that they store – fortunately, the first few days of food that you store is several orders of magnitude more likely to be useful than, say, the 100th day’s worth of food that you store. Those who live in small spaces or without fixed homes might have to look for off-property methods of caching supplies, such as burying buckets in the woods or hiding small caches in unmaintained city property.

Those who rent are less likely to be able to make structural changes to the property and also experience precarity that makes it harder to invest in long-term improvements in the home. Quick fixes might be all they invest in. That’s okay. There’s no perfect. The goal is not to have an impervious bunker of a home. The goal is to improve one’s odds of surviving various crises.

The Prepared Home

Some crises, like wildfire, require us to “bug out,” to grab a bag and flee. These are the minority of crises. Most of the time, we’re better off “bugging in,” sheltering in place. After all, for most of us, our homes are the places with the most resources and the most stability. They are where we are most resilient, where we likely know the most people, and where we know the land the weather.

As a general rule, for any system that we rely on for survival, we should seek to put secondary and eventually tertiary backup systems into place. If we cool our house with AC, we should also plan for creating cross breezes between rooms. If we heat our home with an oil furnace, it’s worth having space heaters just in case–and if possible, a wood-burning stove beyond that. If we rely on the grid for power, it might be worth keeping a whole-house generator or a house battery, or a smaller dual-fuel generator, or even just a few battery packs that can keep our phones charged.

Everything that follows is not a checklist of mandatory preparations but a collection of ideas, a start to brainstorming. Preparedness is often a philosophy with which to approach home improvement rather than a specific project to accomplish.

Basics

I think about resources in terms of threes: three days, three weeks, three months, three years. Three days is by far the most important benchmark. Three months is enough for most people for most purposes.

The absolute basics of preparedness are to have enough resources on-hand to survive a short-term interruption in services. The basics I encourage all of my friends to store include:

• three days food (2000 calories per person per day)

• three days water (a gallon per person per day, depending on weather)

• a small charged external battery

• a multi-band windup radio

• a first aid kid

• an appropriately sized air filter for wildfire smoke

• a rechargeable flashlight or headlamp

• a portable water filter

Resources to Consider

Disposable dishware: When water isn’t working, avoid mess and minimize water use by eating off of disposable dishes such as paper plates.

Candles: Candles are excellent backup sources of emergency light that don’t require electricity. Note that they are not particularly effective for heating a space and that fire safety is of paramount importance. Candles should always be extinguished before you go to sleep. A great number of house fires are started by inattentive use of candles.

Solar generator: “Solar generators” are large-but-portable backup battery systems that incorporate both AC and DC inputs and outlets. They rarely actually come with solar panels, but can be paired with solar panels. They vary widely in capacity and price. Most are capable of running AC appliances for hours, such as fans, fridges, or a pellet stove. Note that electric heating and cooling take substantially more power than most other appliances and are harder to run on backup sources.

Pantry: Most preserved food has a shelf life of a few years, which we will refer to as pantry food. This needs to be rotated with a first in, first out (FIFO) method of storage. This can be as simple as putting new cans at the back of the pantry so that the older cans are likely to be eaten first, or you can build FIFO systems into your pantry, like can dispensers. If you stock your pantry with food from the store, the most effective way to stockpile is to purchase what you actually eat and simply buy additional quantities every time you buy food until you have reached some predetermined limit. For example, if you eat one can of black beans a week on average, then you could buy two cans a week until you have 12 extra cans–-a three-month supply. At this point, you resume buying a single can every week. Pantry food can also be stockpiled by home preservation methods such as canning or dehydrating.

Deep-stored food: Some foods safely store for decades. This food provides a certain peace of mind and can be purchased and then forgotten about as there is no need to rotate through it. There are brands that cater specifically to preppers that offer cans and buckets of beans, rice, oats, lentils, and other such foods at a slight (or not-so-slight) premium. You can also prepare your own food buckets by using mylar bags, oxygen absorbers, and hardware store buckets for about half the cost. This is an excellent community activity, as the supplies necessary are cheaper to buy in bulk and making an event of preparing foods is a nice way to spend the evening and build community bonds. Freeze-dried food also has a long enough shelf life to consider it for deep storage. Home freeze dryers are more expensive than most individuals might want, but a community with a freeze dryer could offer dried food to a lot of people and utilize the short-term abundance of various gardens. Some foods are easier to store indefinitely than others–honey, for example, does not expire and can simply be stored in a cool, dry, dark place. 

Water: Storing water can be as simple as keeping a few gallon jugs in the pantry or as elaborate as a cistern holding thousands of gallons. To start, consider opaque plastic containers that hold between 3-6 gallons each that are designed for longterm storage (smaller people in particular might consider 3 gallon containers as they are easier to lift). While in the abstract, water doesn’t “go bad” on its own, in practice it’s best to dump and refill containers every 3-6 months and to store them in a cool, dark place.

Information: If you rely entirely on your phone, your computer, and access to the internet for information, then that information might not always be available. A hard drive full of books, music, and movies can be used when the internet is down. It is worth having a small print library of how-to and repair books as well as any books of cultural or religious importance. Furthermore, it’s a good idea to keep copies of certain information such as contact information for friends, family, and neighbors as well as a physical atlas and printouts of directions to certain places such as hospitals or the homes of your relatives.

Weapons: For most people and most threat models, you are statistically less safe when there are firearms in the home. Yet for other threat models – including the rise of fascism, which we are currently experiencing – firearms can save entire communities from mob violence and even state-sanctioned genocide. The choice to own firearms should never be made lightly and should be made collectively by all adults in a household, since one person owning a firearm often makes everyone in the house less safe – women in particular are at risk if their male partner owns firearms. If you choose to own firearms, keeping them inaccessible to children and anyone experiencing mental health crises is essential. Gun locks are available free in many places and many states provide them for free with any firearm purchase, but safes are more reliable and more convenient. For home defense, quick-access bedside safes are available. Non-firearm weapons are more universally useful, especially pepperspray. Note that wasp spray’s utility for self-defense is an urban myth.

Household needs: At the beginning of the pandemic, people rushed to stockpile toilet paper, causing toilet paper shortages. Your goal is to prepare not for the crisis that is happening right now, but for potential future crises. Maintaining a year’s worth of toilet paper is often affordable, and gathering that stockpile before there is a crisis means you do not have to contribute to any panic-buying. Maintaining a few months or a year’s worth of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, and toiletries is worth doing. Objects used in common household repairs are worth keeping around as well.

Structural Improvements

Insulation: A well-insulated home regulates temperature more efficiently, which is useful not just for saving money on energy bills but for staying safe during emergencies. Improving insulation can mean everything from hanging heavier curtains and installing weatherstripping to retrofitting the house with new windows and re-insulating the attic.

Refrigeration and freezing: Chest freezers are incredibly power-efficient since they are rarely opened. They can be used to deep-store all sorts of foods for years. It’s worthwhile to keep them full, even if just full of frozen jugs of water, as the more thermal mass they contain, the more efficient they are and the longer than can last in a power outage. This is true of regular kitchen refrigerators and freezers as well, and during an outage it’s important not to open any such devices.

Solar: There are two types of solar installations to consider, on-grid and off-grid. Most larger installations, especially on houses that are connected to the power grid anyway, are on-grid installations. These are not DIY-friendly and require communication with the power company, as they send power to the grid. They also do not function when the power is out unless there is a “house battery” or backup battery installed. These are worth considering, and can power the bare minimum in a house for a long time (such as a well pump, a refrigerator, and a modem). There are various incentives and tax breaks in many states for solar installations, and often the financing for solar only uses the solar equipment itself as collateral. Off-grid solar is localized and easier to DIY, but primarily is used to power DC appliances and doesn’t necessarily work well with existing home infrastructure. It’s particularly applicable to cabins, RVs, and outbuildings and makes a good backup system as well.

Generators: Many people who live in rural areas with inconsistent grid power rely on “whole house generators” that kick on automatically when the power goes out. These are not cheap. They also require maintenance, and most use expensive propane rather than cheaper gasoline or diesel, because propane has an indefinite shelf life while gasoline and diesel do not. Even if you don’t have a whole-house generator, it might be worth keeping a small portable generator around. Dual-fuel ones that can use both propane or gasoline are particularly useful. Never use a generator inside, or even near an enclosed space such as a garage with the door open–improper use of generators is one of the main things that kills people in many disasters. Those who live in apartment buildings might consider running one on the roof and allowing others to make use of it as well.

Rain catchment: Nearly everywhere, it is legal and useful to catch rainwater on your roof and store it for use. The simplest systems involve a diverter from a downpout into barrels that are then tapped to irrigate gardens. More complex systems store more water and combine it with filters to allow it to be used for drinking and cleaning, and/or pumps to send the water to larger cisterns. Most systems I’ve encountered range from 50 gallon barrels to 275 gallon IBC totes (plastic cubes encased in a metal frame) to cisterns of several thousand gallons. 

Gardens: Gardens can provide food. Most gardens provide fruits and vegetables rather than carbohydrates or proteins, but of course those can be grown as well. Since the easiest foods to store long term are carbohydrates, gardens provide excellent nutritional supplement to any stockpiles you have, though it’s harder to be individually self-sufficient than many people assume.

Inside gardening: For certain crises, such as extreme weather and nuclear fallout, being able to grow food inside is invaluable. And of course, for many people living in apartments without balconies, it is the only type of gardening available. This also provides year-round growing. Hydroponics and container gardening are two options. Note that this generally relies on electricity for grow lights.

Compost: It is easy to compost vegetable matter and more complex to compost animal products and human waste, but all are doable at a home scale by a prepared household. The basic rule of composting is to combine carbon (like dead leaves and grass, or shredded cardboard) and nitrogen (like food waste) and let it get real hot. It’s crucial to make sure your compost pile cannot be accessed by dogs, who will get very sick from eating it. It’s also crucial if you are composting animal products or human waste to compost it completely to remove any pathogens.

Fireproofing: No house is fireproof, but many prepared homes do survive wildfire. Most house fires during wildfire are started by embers rather than the actual wall of flame, so preparing a house to survive wildfire includes making sure embers don’t reach fuel. Attic vents should be screened over with metal mesh with holes no larger than ⅛”. Gutters should be cleaned regularly and/or protected from leaf debris. The first five feet out from the side of your house is particularly important and should be kept clear from flammable debris and landscaping. Wooden fences are dangerous if they touch your house, since they serve as a fuse that brings fire to the house, and if you are fleeing from wildfire it might be worth cutting those fences away from the house. Wooden porches can have their undersides screened to prevent embers from falling underneath. Many fire-prone regions have free programs where inspectors come and offer suggestions for how to improve the fire safety of a house. Of course, even if a house is fireproofed, it’s still best to personally evacuate when an evacuation is called for.

Hiding spots: Some types of crises are caused–or exacerbated–by people rather than the weather, and time and time again throughout history people have been saved by their ability to hide. Small objects–passports, money, firearms, contact information, phones–are easier to hide than, for example, people, but hiding places for objects and people are both worth building into furniture or structures. No hiding place is foolproof, of course, but anything that improves the odds of survival is worth considering. Often, the people whom you are hiding are not yourselves, but people of marginalized communities that are under threat.

Hardening: A home can be hardened against violent incursions. A certain level of hardening will cause non-committed attackers to move on to easier targets, while more committed attackers can be unconsciously funneled towards the avenue of attack, preferably some place that is easier for you to actively defend. Even slowing down attackers for a few seconds can mean the difference between meeting them prepared and unprepared. Hardening a home is one of the more expensive and complicated methods of preparedness and is unlikely, for most crises, to be the most important. At the simplest level and the easiest to DIY, there are various types of door armor that make exterior doors much harder to kick or pry open. Cameras and alarms are useful. Windows can be protected with laminating film, but this film works substantially better if it goes all the way into the frame, making it harder to DIY install. Burglar bars can be installed over windows, but most prevent escape in case of a fire, and in most situations, fire is a more likely threat than violent intruders. Bars that can be opened from the inside can be installed but are more costly and complicated. Security shutters are effective but have to be closed–they also help protect the house from storms, however.

Safe rooms and bunkers: While “the bunker mentality” is a foolish one, and we should prepare to work together with other people during nearly every time of crisis, there are moments when safe rooms, storm shelters, and bunkers can be useful, particularly in tornado-prone areas. These generally are expensive and complicated retrofits installed by specialized professionals, but some DIY methods exist.

People: Even in an essay describing resources and infrastructure, it’s impossible to avoid bringing up that people, networks, and community are the most important resource to rely on. In terms of home-improvement, it’s worth considering whether or not living with more people might be useful. A ten-acre farm is a lot more productive with three families working on it than just one. Fences torn down between two urban yards create spaces that are more usable by everyone involved. An apartment building, working together, can introduce infrastructure that helps every occupant. Van dwellers are more resilient in a caravan, and those who live in tents are safer in encampments.