I want to follow the last post about keeping a pantry with a post about how we have made our home to be comfortable during a power outage.
I simply do not like to be uncomfortable and if our power goes out or we have a disruption in our water supply we can switch over without switching anything here at our house and this is what we did.
I am sharing this with you so you can get some of your own ideas. It seems almost every day we hear of storms knocking out power somewhere. We have been told over and over to prepare emergency kits and have plans for emergencies and for power outages.
If our power goes out just before dinner time or breakfast or whenever we just go out to our back porch to cook our meal.
We keep camping stoves handy and we actually use these often when we cook smelly food such as fish, cabbage and such.
We do not keep as much refrigerated food as most Americans do. We have a small dorm style refrigerator. If the power goes out we don't have much to worry about.
We just go to our pantry or to our canned food in Windsor our 1920s icebox.
We have our outdoor washing area to wash laundry and a clothesline to hang our laundry so I don't have to let laundry pile up during a power outage or a way to wash and dry things that may have gotten wet.
It is very important to have a way to dry our clothes other than using an electric or gas clothes dryer.
We have our nice outdoor bath house that Charles built and where we take bucket baths. Let me tell you a bucket bath is more refreshing than a shower. If we want to heat the water you will notice another camp stove in the background with a yellow pot on top where we heat water for our bath. This is a very good way to clean up after working in the yard on a hot day.
What we do is we heat the water or maybe not depending how hot or cold it is outside and we dip with that small pot hanging and use that to pour water over our body. We soap up, wash our hair or whatever and dip and pour how much we need to get the soap off. You can take a nice bath with one bucket of water and really not even that much.
We keep these containers full of city water. We have extra buckets to fill should we know in advance there is going to be a water disruption. We also have rain barrels in another area, we use the rain water to water plants but could be used during a water outage.
We use our stoves to heat water for washing dishes. It is not necessary for us to use disposable because we really can just keep doing things as normal in the house if the power goes out.
We have a big green egg for baking bread or pizza or cooking most anything. A big green egg is very expensive and there are other options such as a Coleman oven and such as that. Baking can be done over a campfire in a dutch oven.
I can sew on my treadle sewing machine....
Or sit by a window in the day and sew something by hand.
I may do some knitting and knit Charles another pair of slippers.
We have a Berkey Water Filter for filtering rain water if we need or water from our barrels.
We have oil lamps in every room but we only light the lamps in the rooms we are in and always turn them out when we leave the room. We also have solar bulbs but we prefer these lamps.
We have three working Lavabo's in the house where the water will come out of a small faucet into a bowl for washing hands, brushing teeth or washing up.
We have composting toilets, instead of using the old chamber pots like they did in the past, we add sawdust to the bottom, do our business, add a couple of hand fulls of sawdust on top of that and it never smells. I keep one pot to hold the sawdust and one for using. I like to make a mixture of peatmoss and pet bedding you get from the pet store. You can buy a large bag from a pet store or tractor supply. This works well for camping trips and fortunately here in the city we have not had a sewer disruption before. We have had a water disruption a few times but not a sewer issue but we never know because flooding can cause issues with the sewers. Just last year during two hurricanes there were issues with not being able to flush toilets. This is a very good solution should you have a sewer issue.
For getting up at night this chamber pot can be used as well. We have working chamber pots in each bedroom with sawdust so life can go on as normal should we be having a complete outage and everything is very dark and you don't want to walk around the house.
It keeps me from stressing over outages, I do worry about that storm that could come and wipe out everything but I can only pray that never happens.
You can do this too, you don't have to do it over the many years we have collected things for outages. a five gallon bucket with a swimming pool noodle across the rim makes a comfy composting toilet. A wood box composting toilet can be built or you can buy a nice composting toilet.
If you like modern things there are many solar ways to go with portable solar. You can buy bath houses from the camping sections in stores if you don't want to build a bath house or you can simply take a bucket bath in the bathtub in the house which we have done.
We built the bath house because it gets very hot here in the summer where we live and it is cooler to take a bucket bath outdoors.
Also I forgot to take pictures of the fans but we have 4 battery fans to help when it is terribly hot. But the best way to stay cool in the heat is to sit with your feet in a pan of water and keep your wrist wet too and wet a towel to put around your neck. This will cool you off.
I hope this helps give you some ideas to solve how you would get through a long term power outage in comfort. Grandma Donna
