Monday, July 4, 2011

How are the preps coming

  Over time many of us find ourselves burning out or getting side tracked in our preps.  We try to only buy our food stuffs on sales and in large quantities and get very used to doing this.  Lately we have found as we are taking inventory of our storage rooms that we have over done certain items.  As the summer bbq season was about to start I bought a couple of dozen bottles of bbq sauce and the same day at a different store my wife did the same.  We laughed about the oops as we loaded them on to a shelf and proceeded to forget about it.  A month later I was in a store and saw bbq sauce on sale and proceeded to buy a couple dozen more bottles.  Once I was home and went to put them away I very quickly saw my mistake.  I now have so much of this on the shelf I may never get through it all.  This is not the end of the world as we know it but that money could have been better used somewhere else.  Up until this point we did not really plan out our shopping trips just went with the sales and staple foods.  We have now learned that we need to do a inventory before every trip and write a list.  It does not matter how good the sale is if we will never use it before it goes bad.  Since this discovery that many of you take completely for granted we have a spreadsheet with our total long and short term stores that we update every time we add or remove anything from the storage rooms.  We do not include anything in the cupboards into our inventories but each to their own.
  Since this wake up we have sat down and wrote out meal plans and figured out exactly what is needed and filled any of the holes that we found in the supplies.  The idea behind this is to be able to keep our diet as close to the same post SHTF as before it.  If we are able to take this stressor out of our lives the survivablity of a bad situation goes up in our opinions.
  We also inventoried our non food stored items and found that we needed more focus in this area.  If the economy were to crash tomorrow or a disaster/war what items do we need that are hard for us to produce for ourselves.  Some of the items that we came up with were rope, thread, buttons, velcro, plastic sheeting, nails, plywood, pipe/tubing and bottled propane etc.  Once we had identified these items we were very quickly able to obtain them and move on to something else.  As we think of anything else we write it down on a list and then determine a priority level and then the amount required.
  Since we do have a fairly large amount of storage space we have left items like TP and kleenex permanently of the list for purchase when we see them on sale.  Rodents and moisture are the only real enemies of these products and if you have both of those under control the paper products have an unlimited shelf life.
  One thing that we have looked into is getting some steel barrels with seal-able lids to store sugar flour pasta and rice still in their factory packaging but without exposure to any air or moisture in our storage rooms. 
  The end of our preparing may never come but we as a family have reached a place that will provide for our needed long after the supermarket shelves are empty.  Stay safe and keep prepping.

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