Long Term Survival

I could build a house for the long term, however somebody else would have to live there for the long term because I'm not at all sure that my physical body is going to last any "long term".

 

The hardest thing for people now days to adapt to is the massive down scaling that they will have to do in what they need for a "house". Even in my lifetime the size of the one family home has almost doubled. Regular homes used to be one bathroom two or three bedroom places with an eat in kitchen and a living room. I think that the house I was raised in was like 1200 square feet. What is strange is that families were bigger then but now houses are 2000 square feet minimum.

For a survival home you want to have more of a compound situation than a single big house. During the winter it is a lot easier to warm a single room with a loft than anything else. You have to understand, people didn't used to sit in their houses like we do now. They were hot in the summer. You moved out to the porches or brush arbors. Also you really don't want to be cooking in your home except maybe a fireplace pot during the winter. Back in the days when people were cooking on open fires and such the kitchen burned down pretty often. Cast irn pots don't burn up so it wasn't all that bad. You pulled out your pots and such and rebuilt. Replacing your clothes and such wasn't nearly as easy.

It wasn't until the advent of really good safe wood burning stoves that the cooking kitchen was moved into the house. An old time home was a collection of barns sheds and storage buildings with a small house where you went mostly to sleep and stay warm in the winter times.

If you are having to build it with only non powered tools and from available materials Keeping it small is just about all that you can do unless you have a huge amount of lumber and nails stored ahead of time. The advent of sawmills was another thing that made the building of bigger houses easier.

The only "insurance" that you will have is whatever you provide for yourself. That means don't put everything in one place where a fire could wipe you out. Don't even put all of your tools in one place or your guns or your clothes. This also will protect you from say robbers that attacked your place and just grabbed stuff and left. Every shed should have a hiding hole that you keep stocked with what you got to have. You might also have a storage container hidden somewhere away from your homestead.

When you are cooking with fires you really shouldn't invest as much into building your home as people do now. Fires are going to happen. Thatched roofs don't last like asbestos shingles did nor do they protect your house from sparks coming out of the chimney. Even cedar shake shingles will dry out and burn from sparks.

It is sad that so many things that our forefathers learned over centuries of slow progression were just cast aside in just a couple of generations and are now mostly lost. We will have to relearn so many of the old things. I am 65 and even I was raised in a world that was primitive by today's views. How many of you have experienced the pleasures of a two hole outhouse in the dead of winter??? How many of you have owned and cared for a horse and other livestock. My Dad rode a horse to school. I had a horse for most of my life. They worked the fields with mules in harness just as people have for centuries. They heated and cooked with wood that they had to cut and split themselves. The Iceman delivered ice to keep your ice box cold if you lived in town. By the time he died everything that had been considered normal for dozens of generations was gone. I learned some of it but there is no interest in it now so it will mostly die with me and my generation.

 

It looks like you are in a great spot Keith!

 

Long term as always there will be many paths for different people. At some point after any crash things return to the same paths that people have followed for millennia. Just as we are preparing now to survive the fall there will also need to be plans for what you want to do when things level out. In the short term everyone needs to prepare to grow their own food or gather it for themselves but after things settle down not everyone wants to or needs to be a farmer, rancher, fisherman. You are also going to need mills to grind our grain, Smiths to build and repair our tools, Cobblers to make and repair shoes, weavers to make cloth and people to make our clothes... It goes on and on and most of these trades are a lost trade as far as doing it by hand without power tools.

Everyone needs a profession that they can go to when times are hard. We all have talents and skills. Even just having the tools and books ahead of time might be enough. Pick something now and make it a hobby. Do something that you enjoy or learn to make something that you like. I wanted a sheath for a knife that I made and ended up making holsters and all sorts of leather crafts over the many years.

 

We are still in the process of getting our long term survival place ready. Five acres of land that's hidden enough, but not terribly far from a smallish town. The land is ours. We needed a shelter, so moved a smaller single wide mobile home there, got it for free, and is 840sqft. Plenty of land to start a garden and plant some bushes/trees and get a few animals. There's some wild game around: deer, quail, turkey. The hubby hopes to put in a small pond for fish. We won't be off grid for a while, but would be a goal. Hoping for self-sufficiency and bugging in. Far enough away from big cities in an area no one would really want or possibly think to look (that is the hope, otherwise they get to meet some barrels).

Just waiting on the electric people to get us juice out there before we move there permanently, we will be bugging in. Most of the reason for doing this, for us, was to severely scale back economically. Being more self sufficient should also really help in SHTF scenarios. There's just so many scenarios to try to get ready for. We are starting with economic crashing scenario and going from there.

 

Old Geezer: I am right with you. I don't even buy green bananas. My health is relatively good. My wife's is not. Things that were once routine are now a chore, and take twice as long. My definition of "long term" has changed dramatically.

 

What is touted in some journals and seems to work for me to slow down aging is to take about one teaspoon of apple cider vinegar with some water every day . I am nearly 70 years old and backpacked about 60 pounds of camping stuff into the beartooth mountains of Montana last fall . I actually take about half a teaspoon of turmeric and something they call black bean along with it . It's all cheap so not a lot to lose by trying .

 

Here are some of the considerations i made when i picked out my remote retirement ranch in 2006.

First, frost free growing season, annual precip, soil type and fertility.
Second, land prices, taxes, and regulatory burden.
Finally, i looked for like minded people.

I started out looking at the western United States, narrowing it down to eight states, OR, ID, UT, AZ, NM, MO, AR, OK.
The focused on the Ozark and Ouachita mtns of Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

 

My everyday go-to is honey and cinnamon; the Viking cure-all. My blood pressure is perfect. My cholesterol is stupid low. All the other blood numbers are great. Then my doctor looks at my body, and says " That is a lot better than you deserve." Guilty as charged. If we can find out what is in my blood to make the numbers so good when I am in such poor shape we will sell it.