The Preppers’ Guide to Securing Your Home for the Next Disaster
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If the coronavirus showed us one thing, it was that the U.S. — and the world, for that matter — was underprepared for a worldwide catastrophe. As the pandemic disrupted supply chains, shuttered businesses, and shut down economies, everyone scrambled to pull together what they needed for the ensuing months in quarantine. The results? Everyone stocked up on toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
While it’s nice to both have a solid stock of soft, double-ply and be able to wash your hands in a pinch, the truth is, no one really knew what the heck they needed to be ready for a genuine, bonafide disaster.
Preparing Your Home for the Next Disaster
Now that the first stage of the COVID-19 crisis is behind us and the grocery store shelves are restocked (at least for the moment), it’s time for everyone to take a deep breath, look back at the lessons that the previous few months taught us, and prepare for the future.
In particular, it’s important to make sure that the homefront is ready to go, should you need to harbor there again for an extended period of time. Here is a list of the top tips and activities that you should consider implementing in your home before the next crisis strikes.
A Quick Note Before Starting
Keep in mind, this isn’t a comprehensive list.
In the same way that someone in Florida should consider hurricane prep while someone in upstate NY should be thinking about potential blizzards, each situation warrants a different set of preparation instructions. However, you can use this list as a starting point to create a long-term disaster preparedness plan for your particular circumstances.
Solidify Your Staples
First thing’s first: make sure that you have a solid store of the basic survival staples. While this can include toilet paper and hand sanitizer, it should also include other emergency kit basics, such as a three-day supply of water, food, and medications, spare batteries, a multi-purpose tool, and a hand-crank radio.
Additionally, consider setting up a chicken coop for eggs (and meat if things get serious), purchasing a generator for alternative power, and growing a victory garden to help you keep food on the table if supplies get low.
Privatize Your Property
If things go seriously south and everyone is looking for supplies or is out of power, you don’t necessarily want the whole neighborhood knowing that you’re cooking up delicious food in a house that’s well-lit by a generator. Even if you completely trust your neighbors and would invite them over to hunker down together, it’s still helpful to have the ability to withdraw into your own privacy if you want to.
With that in mind, make sure that you:
- Hang solid black-out curtains to obscure the view into your home.
- Plant screening trees and shrubs to provide greater privacy in your yard.
- Install cameras and motion-activated floodlights so that you know if someone comes onto your property.
You can gauge the intensity of your privacy efforts depending on your relationship with your neighbors and the kind of area that you live. However, it’s important to at least give it serious thought to the possibility of a lack of privacy before a disaster strikes.
Create a Home Maintenance Checklist
If you have to shelter in place for months at a time again, you may not be able to access professional help for a while. While it’s helpful to have a good supply of food and water, it’s also wise to consider how to care for your home during a lockdown as well.
Go over your home from top to bottom and create a maintenance checklist of what you should be keeping an eye on if you’re left to care for your house on your own. Things to consider include:
- Sealing drafts around windows and doors.
- Trimming back trees and brush that grow near your house.
- Maintaining your gutters.
- Cleaning out your furnace and air conditioning units.
- Taking care of your lawnmower.
- Having plumbing tools and materials on hand to fix leaks.
- Stocking replacement fire and carbon monoxide detectors.
There are plenty of things to keep up on around your house. Make sure you’re aware of the most important items so that you can keep an eye on them if you’re holed up in your home on your own for a while.
Adopt Minimalism
Finally, if you want to truly anticipate successfully living through the next catastrophe, it’s worthwhile to consider adopting a minimalist lifestyle in the here and now. Minimalism revolves around only keeping things that genuinely provide you worth. If you have excess, don’t feel the need to keep it around cluttering up your living space.
This doesn’t just apply to those old high school soccer trophies, either. You can have a “reduce, reuse, and recycle” mindset with everything. Your clothes can be worn until they wear out — and even then they can be turned into rags. Food scraps and other edible waste can be saved for leftovers, used for compost, or fed to the chickens.
The point is, start living with greater austerity now and it won’t feel as dramatic in the future — plus you’ll reduce your impact on both the environment and your bank account in the process.
Preparing The Homefront for Disaster
There are many things to tend to in the event of a disaster. Most preparations tend to revolve around the need for staples like food, drink, and heat. However, it’s also critical that you prepare your shelter — that is, your home — for whatever may come your way.
If you button up your dwelling so that it can weather any catastrophe, you’ll position yourself to be in better shape right from the get-go the next time life throws you a curveball.
Great points, but a lot of people rent, this adds another layer of complexity. When I was renting, planting victory garden, installing cameras or reinforcing the doors wasn’t an option. The small things that you can do is to apply glass break sensors to each window pane on lower level, so at least you have some advanced warning of entry. I had battery powered sensors on the doors, windows and added locks to the bedrooms, so we had a chance to respond. A small dog is also useful alert system and distraction, and doesn’t eat much (but does cost a lot in medical bills even if healthy). A dog is also useful in relieving the stress from being confined to a small place for month. You could also reinforce the doors with bars that go from the floor to the door knob and have some simplistic way of restricting sliding doors from being open wide enough for a person to enter, yet allow for ventilation. Keep your garage doors closed and consider the door from garage to the house an external door, keep it locked. If you park outside garage do not leave your garage door opener in the car. Importantly, make sure each member of your family knows what to do if alarm goes off in the middle of the night, so that you know exactly where will they be, or what will they do. Keeping your car in good running order, fueled up. Invest in larger fire extinguishers and put them around the house, but in the kitchen have foam extinguishers and some fiberglass cloth to cover common stove fires rather than messing up entire kitchen. Just common sense things.
Speaking of power outages, battery powered motion detector lights along stairs are important safety precaution, you don’t want to tumble down stairs in the dark. Headlights are extremely useful as they free up your hands and you can point them with your head, pick ones with wide angle light pattern. A small lithium power pack to charge vital electronics is a must, unless you can do that from a laptop USB port without firing your laptop up. Generator is nice, especially if you have one with automatic transfer switch, but they are noisy and consume a lot of fuel whether charging a phone or running a whole house. So it is best to have a small battery bank that you can quickly bulk charge from generator and then use that until it runs out. Critical to have backup power for those relying on medical devices.
Since I moved into my own place I did install wired cameras with NVRs and monitors in four locations inside the house where we spend most of time, and also have old cell phones at each entry that show only the single camera just outside the door, so you know who is standing there before opening the door. Not to mention various reinforcements on the doors, including installing metal rails on each pane of garage door (you may need to upgrade the springs). I have motion detection sensors around my perimeter and infrared lights to augment the IR lights on the cameras (I can see well beyond my own property at night, while the yard is as dark as every other yard). You can apply safety film on the glass of your windows, not bulletproof, but makes entry much more difficult and noisier. I fully agree with blackout curtains, but I opted for roll-down shades that go about 10 inches beyond the edges of the window frame, helps to take a power nap at noon too if you had to take an overnight watch. The shades block light better and are cheaper. If you live in a two-three story building – a roll-down fire escape ladder is a must in each bedroom, I would think.
Food, water, meds, tools, raw materials, cooking and water purification devices, communications (cell, internet, radio) goes without saying. If you live in cold climate a way to heat a small internal room (not much you could do for cooling without power, maybe a 12V fan).
If you are in process of moving now – consider what makes a home resilient and chose wisely. Pick a house outside a flood zone, not at the bottom of a hill where all the sewage flows from the neighbors (where will it go when pumps fail? into your basement), with water well, with area where you can start a garden (and actually do it before you need it, it is hard work to get one going and producing), consider entire neighborhood and external threats, is there a high value target somewhere close by, what is upwind, or upstream, etc. etc.
Tough task, I am still not where I want to be after making significant efforts to improve my situation. You you need to accept that all that may be gone in a house fire or some natural disaster. But every small thing you do now will make your life much safer and easier in case you need to hunker down. Don’t be discouraged, start small and build it over time. You do this not because you fear the unknown, you prepare to be there for your family when they need you. Good luck!
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