Seeing now what we use, I want to make a list of things that I know that we go through a lot when "locked down".  Could be a future outbreak (they are saying that this could come back in the fall...if we even get "through" it before then), earthquake, whatever.

Right now, I'm filling gaps as best I can by mail order...when I can find things, rather than going to the stores.  People around here are awful at the whole "social distancing" thing.  Kids throughout the neighborhood were all out playing with each other this week.  Stores have long lines of people to get in.  

I'm hoping that things calm down enough and stores are stocked enough that we can get a good rotating supply going.  Since we mostly use fresh ingredients and my wife makes everything from scratch, this is a major adjustment.  I'd like to find temporary substitutes that I have seen people posting about here (such as Augason farms #10 cans of dried fruit, shelf-stable canned butter, powdered milk, some sort of cheese substitute, etc).

My concern is that things won't be settling down any time soon, meaning that trying to creating a rotating stock at this point is either impossible or at best very difficult.  I have been fortunate to find a few things in stock here and there, like powdered milk, oatmeal, etc.

I managed to convince the wife to get a little extra food, mostly frozen, before the lock downs came.  We're eating differently now, and she didn't pick up everything I asked for, but she's an amazing cook so she's doing wonders with some random ingredients that we do have on hand.  Baby food is the hardest right now, and I also wish we had more meat.

I'm still not convinced on the freeze-dried meat thing.  Something in me just has a distrust of the mountain house style bags...mostly that at some point (whether in packing, shipping, storage, etc) that I'm going to get a pinhole in the bag somewhere.

Check your IM

We have exactly 3 masks. They're left over from my stab at woodworking a few years back.

I had plenty of gloves since I use them quite a bit for cleaning / oils / grease etc.

Biggest gap in my preps is not having all the seeds for my garden.  For some reason I just put off placing an order.  So I need to start keep enough on hand for the next year in advance.  Fortunately I was able to order most of what I wanted.

We live on a farm and only hit the grocery store up about once a month.  We raise our own protein (beef,pork,chicken). We butchered a steer and 3 pigs in February so meat we are good on.  Our garden is 3/4 of an acre and we can, freeze and dehydrate a lot.

But having nice fresh lettuce for a salad is something I miss.  We have an area in the basement where we a start our garden seeds.  I started lettuce down there about 3 weeks ago.  I think in the winter months I might have to keep some growing all the time.

My wife loves frozen pizza and she’s been out for a month now.  Need to store more ingredients for pizza’s in the future and some comfort food in general.

Have plenty of masks and ppe on hand.  Gave a bunch of masks to my sister who’s a nurse.

I was a little ahead of the curve and made a binge buy at WalMart in the beginning of February, getting Purell and Clorox wipes stocked but the Lysol spray eluded me much to my dismay.  OTC meds were well stocked and N95 masks were stocked but not as deep as I would like.  

But just to make myself feel better I bought a Hutch Mountain propane conversion for my Honda 2000 gen set.  It was a lot less expensive than the solar unit that I looked at and the propane is already set back in abundance.  I don't like having too much gas around anyway... diesel is a
different story.  
So far, so good.  Stay safe and stay healthy!

The MULE

Things have been going reasonably smooth here.

The one issue I had was misplacing a case of N95 masks that I had taken some and shipped to CA for the clean up effort from the fires.  My family and others in the area were getting robbed by local gouging.  I guess I never put what was left back in place.  Aside from this my Wife is going a bit stir crazy.  

We havent really touched our emergency supplies yet.  I limited supply runs to once every two weeks to limit exposure.  Part of the supply runs is to secure some things to maintain morale for the Wife and kids.  Our kids are too young to really understand whats going on.  We do have a few friends that are confirmed cases, likely from my friends Wife who is a nurse who contracted it along with another coworker of hers.  They are doing alright, any supplies they need are getting dropped off on their door step so they dont need to go out.  Supplies for many things are starting to become more scare here, if this continues longer I expect we will need to resort to our storage.

We have been pretty lucky so far as we both have not lost our income.  That puts us ahead of the game as neither of us is in a high risk category.  We are both looking forward to this ending soon.

I plan you use a diluted bleach solution in a spray bottle to use when my off the shelf anti-bacterial sprays are depleted.  They are consistently not in stock anywhere here.

We did ok but were low in the cycle on a few things. Tp was a bit low but in January I got nervous and ordered two cases.

We were low on canned beans and due to sickness, were a bit low on vitamin c (I think we've already had covid in December of last year).

The one thing we're really low on: space to store a lot of this. This home has low storage space.

I need a shed

Quality hair clippers. They have all but disappeared from store shelves and online. At least at reasonable prices. Maybe I can trade some N95 masks for one.

Got seed 'taters for my garden.

Found out I REALLY wanted a potato plow.  

Ordered one from Heavy Hitch.  Damn expensive, but I have a lot of their stuff and it's top quality, heavy duty and made in Minnesota.

Might sound silly, but try pet supply stores. I got a set a few years back. They were Wahl brand with all the numbered attachments for hair length. There’s a set at chewy.com for $42.99 and free shipping for orders above $49.

@dreiwhit

Signup for an azure standard drop. Bulk food at good prices. Did my first one yesterday and picked up 75lbs of flour to feed the family and neighbors for a couple months with good home made bread, yeast and sourdough starters can be found on eBay right now but I would act fast.

I got lucky there. I bought the last set that Amazon had a couple of weeks back, a Wahl with color-coded guards.

Now I have to figure it out so I don't look like I just escaped from WWII Europe. LOL

We were pretty good for most things, what I found I was lacking on was prepping the defense capabilities in case they were needed.

I made "go bags" for the shooters in the house with their holsters, belts, ammo, magazines, and each knows which bag is theirs.  If told to "gear up" they now know where all their stuff is...

I know, 1st world problems.

Freezer space is a premium and for the past couple of years I’ve been eyeballing a freeze dryer for the home. This pandemic has sold the misses how important my prepping has been. I figure my stimulus check will help with a nice portion of that.

Anyone familiar with the operation and maintenance of one?

The freezer in my garage decided to die just as COVID-19 was ramping up. It was an all out scramble to find a chest freezer. Perfect example of Murphy's Law. It was stressful keeping everything cold in Pelican and Yeti coolers while on the hunt for a new freezer.

I had few large Cooler Shock ice packs that saved the food but I barely scraped by. Had my freezer hunt lasted any longer, I would have lost $100's worth of meat.

Lesson Learned:

Have plenty of Cooler Shock available. It may take up space in the freezer but it will save you in an emergency.

Attached File

Do Costco employees do your shopping and deliver it to you or is it more like Uber Eats where someone else picks it up and delivers it to you?

Yes for sure. Thankfully, the GD thread got me up to speed fast. Who woulda though GD could be helpful. Amazon Prime got stuff headed for the house even while I was at sea and before the real panic set in. I got in just under the wire with many of my gaps...which were clearly all my fault...2018-2019 were two extremely care free years for me and I slacked heavily in the prep world.  Looking back, I do wish I had spent the extra 2-300 bucks and bought a slightly bigger freezer, but I’m not losing sleep over what I have. I also should have taken lessons from previous experience with panic buys and purchased more of this or that when I had the chance. I went to Walmart on Monday for some things and had to go back Tuesday for something else only to see things completely out of stock from the day before.

Whenever the dust settles from this, I and my family will be better for it in the future.

Definitely! I had major surgery back in December and had no income. We plowed through preps during that time. Got back to work mid February then this hit. Been off since March 24th. Didn’t have short term disability at time of surgery because I was dumb and thought I was invincible and didn’t need it. That has been remedied. Now it’s trying to replenish what we used up, including toilet paper! Was lacking in meds, sanitation, and comms. Working on that as well.

Hahahahha, neither. in my experience some dude in Costco tossed about 80lbs of random stuff per huge box, slapped on a label and made it fed ex's problem. I got 3 huge boxes, no rhyme, reason to what was in each one, no where near enough packaging, and each box looked like it insulted a fedex loader's mother on the way in the door. Just picture your normal shopping tossed into a 3x4x2 box with a 24 pack of coke and then shipped upside down. Most things made it intact though.

We were halfway thru reorganizing some freezers full of old elk meat and fish, had to defrost one that had been left partly open and somewhat thawed before being found.  I consider that stuff good for drying into dog treats.  So I have a whole freezer full of substandard meat.  Another freezer is full of bait for crabbing, salmon, and sturgeon fishing.  And they closed fishing down- bastards!  So really wish we had finished that process and stocked up other stuff before this happened.  

Some N95’s had old straps that broke and needed to be fixed.  My stockpile was much reduced from house projects.  Ordered some in January but the order was cancelled and I didn’t notice until prices had jumped.  Have good stock of P100’s and actual CBRN capable masks though if things had truly gone rampant and the virus was more deadly than it has ended up being.  

Financial investments were where I got caught napping.  Was worried about supplies at the house, not my deferred comp stuff.  Oops.

Also found that I had a lot of really old canned food that was part of the storage we had on hand.  Need a better method of rotating thru canned goods so that does not happen again.  We try to just stock mostly stuff we use, but while I always date things, the wife might not always do it.  And stuff in the back just gets missed,  I would use those rolling storage things but they seem to take up a lot of space.

Wife has been appreciative of the fact that we always have lots of TP, shop towels, paper towels, kleenex, bleach, alcohol, wet wipes, baby wipes, and gloves in the supplies, with most of that becoming hard to get suddenly.  I didn’t think it would be so rough on the paper supply- we have paper mills nearby that make the stuff, they are working, and I figured they would have switched a lot of commercial supply residential by now but it is still in short supply at times.  We got some paper towels and TP last week, first time it has been available for a while- online pickup ordering hasn’t had it available due to how fast it is gone from the store.  Next time I will store twice as much, most of it doesn’t go bad except bleach- and I have pool shock for that.    

Meat- wish we had a lot more chicken, pork, and beef.  We have lots of salmon, tuna, and elk.  I know a beef farmer so we can get some awesome waigu (however it is spelled) if it gets rough, but I don’t know about pork and chicken.  So far the end of the world is pretty good with barbequed salmon and tuna every week.  

Had to pick up some gardening supplies, expanding our garden area due to my wife planting a giant sequoia tree in a corner years ago despite my saying it was a horrible spot- now it is shading out her raised beds, so guess who needs to build a couple new raised beds...me.

Stuff like that.  

Spare parts for reloading equipment- have broken two Lee decapping pins since this started!  

Thankfully, this is all slow rolled, lots of people learning what they need to work on, unfortunately I am willing to bet plenty of people end up thinking “that wasn’t so bad, no need to be prepared” without realizing that we have been in a very minor hiccup (so far- the economic damage is just beginning).

I'm in the market for something to do this as well.  And you're right about the 'rolling' shelf things; they don't hold a lot versus the space they take up.

This has always been my main concern.  I't was pretty obvious in a short amount of time the virus wasn't gonna be as bad as they could make it sound (not sayin it ain't bad), but all the infinite possibilities of everything else kinda scares the hell outta me.

We're at a point where there is just too many "what if"s.

i realized I had lots of "stuff" bought, just not processed into its forever home, or usable. Lots of projects halfway there. Part of my quarantine lesson was to finish up all the halfway completed projects. Like a big multi barrel water setup that I never set back up after a recent move, but not the new hose or sealant or time to reinstall. Looks "prepper" but non functional.

Canned goods I had a lot of but storage and rotation I was never good at. I had 3 out of 8 cameras set up for instance, running cat 5 sucks, but only one left now. Most but not all the home security setup, but some sensors still in the box. Battery charger setups bought, but not organized and standardized, just oh I need a good charger for 18500s, a good aa charger, all disorganized in a drawer, so mounting those all together for a charging station, things like that.

My concern started with the parts I'd need to finish those things with a stressed supply chain, things like more connectors for my portable solar panels I never got around to getting, replacement batteries for UPS,  So I've been finishing up all the main projects and filling in parts/supplies gaps along the way.

For canned storage I had the parts (mostly, bought more) setup on shelves, but not organized, and just never finished the plan to build a high density FIFO storage  hutch type thing for my pantry. So my weekend project now is to finish this out for my pantry for storage and rotation. 3 x Fifo can tracker and 3 x can tracker mini units, in about a 44" wide x 26" high x 16" deep box. Should be maybe 250 cans plus the top will have a lip to hold one off cans. Some sanding and paint to match and It'll blend in to the existing shelves.

Nope.

Still go grocery shopping once a week for essentials.

Did buy a steer tho, long before the c19 hoax.  But he won't be ready for the freezer until summer's end.

I'll probably be dead by then.  Probably.

We're not seeing the case number diminish because they're not deducting from it for those who recover.  This is all totally biased reporting.  They also cite in the death figures anyone who dies from anything but also tests positive OR LOOKS LIKE THEY HAD IT.  What I and so many of us want over more than anything is the government harassment and control.  That is the real pain in the ass.  This is otherwise America where we can fix anything else except the stupid government.

Anyway, what the whole situation has pointed out is that I need to prepare for a lot of things and am way, WAY behind.  Currently I'm out of work so can't stock up too much.  Number one thing I gotta do is kick out my in-laws from our house and start to get the wife back on the same page.  They're f***ing sheeple that have completely ruined her.  I have got to get them away from her and my son and out of my house so she and I can get back on the same page AND so all of our space and storage can be for taking care of us instead of storing their 20-30 bins of decorations, spare furniture, millions of framed pictures and dolls, etc.

https://youtu.be/UJgRk1p8ktY

It’s been a learning experience to be sure. We’re in good shape but one thing surprised me a bit. Lots of places don’t want to handle cash. Unique to a virus situation but not something I thought about. Part of our preps is a supply of cash, couple $k in smaller bills. Pretty much useless in many cases. Plenty of plastic, so no worries. But I didn’t plan on it.

My biggest fail so far has been toilet paper.  The neck beards are still hoarding it around here.  Amazon Prime came to the rescue with an 80 roll box but that's not the point.  I believe another box will go into my preps.  A couple of boxes wouldn't be excessive because it was like gold for a while around here.  Toilet paper of all things.

One tax refund,  I used my standard system to decide "how much" toilet paper I wanted

There's a useless piece cubic footage of basement in behind the furnace.

I took 2 cases, stacked them in that spot, opened the side of the top one to get the rolls out.

I added one case at a time to the the stack. I quit when the shortest person in the house couldn't easily get a roll out of the top box. This is how much I keep on hand.

Now, I buy one case when the top one is empty.

When I was done, for about 120/150 bucks I had between 650, and 780 rolls of toilet paper, and it ain't in the way.  If I go through all that, I got bigger issues to worry about, and I never really have to worry about a toilet paper crisis.

No N95's, Not one!  The only mask I had was the painters respirator.

I am sure I have many other gaps, but will only find those as other SHTF in the future.

Bill

Hip waders, to help me navigate all the bullshit on the internet about the crisis.

As usual, the fundamentals are always primary.  In the case of the "Virus", things are no different.  

Rule of 3's:  Air, water, and food, in that order

Use Masks/social distancing to prevent contamination.  That's the "Air" aspect.  Some decontamination will be required as far as items coming into your de-contaminated environment.

As far as water, most "filters" will not serve to exclude viruses.   Plan on using bleach to decontaminate possibly suspect water supplies.  Most civic water supplies will be OK.  Things are not so bad that one needs to question such at the moment, if ever.

I doubt adequate food supplies will be a problem within the US.  Having some food supplies on-hand might come in quite handy in the days ahead, though.

There is some evidence that some food processing plants have encountered some problems with their staff, but no evidence that the products, once fully cooked, are problematic.

This is a significant problem, but not a problem that the intelligent person cannot overcome.

As for myself, and YMMV, I have come to try to "Eat-Out" at bargain prices, so as to not consume my at-home supplies of food, and to support local businesses.  I always buy some canned meats and so forth when I go to the market--much more than I have consumed, and so not draw on my stored food supplies, and so augmenting stored food supplies.

Yes and we are trying to address these issues in a reasonable amount of time.

I was way behind. I bought this place 5 years ago with big “prepping” plans, i got caught short, immediately rectified some of those , but got long way to go.

I had some N100 masks, but failed to note that they expired in 2014.  As a result, only about half of them were useable when I broke them out in March.  The exhalation valve material had discolored and hardened up.  Frigging silly of me to not check them more frequently.  Now I have exactly one mask left, and can't resupply at all.  Actually, my wife is issued some shitty KN-95 masks that her company provided, but we have zero faith in them, being of questionable Chinese mfg.  I could really use some N95 masks for my wife (retail pharmacist) and myself so I don't get sick and infect her and my son.

I let my TP stash get too low, to the point where I had maybe 3 weeks worth.  By heroic efforts, I managed to score enough during the last month to build up to perhaps a couple months worth.  I definitely need to get more TP when it becomes available again.

Hopefully one side effect of opening businesses back up is people will start to "go" in commodes at commercial facilities that use the TP that doesn't enter the residential market, which will decrease the demand for the nice soft thick two-ply stuff.

Yes it has. Wife and I are already discussing further 2 is 1 and 1 is none strategies.

The main thing we were missing were dry goods and canned staples. Not bad but not enough to get us through if this has went long term lockdown