Our Year Started with a Shivering Bang

Our journey toward being more self-sufficient started with food storage, but it didn’t end there.  A situation we lived through last week made me very glad that our journey didn’t begin and end with food storage.

So, our 2018 started with a bang, around 7:30 the morning of January 1st, when a child figured out that our water wasn’t working. We had had the coldest temperatures here in central Illinois that we’ve ever had.  We had 3-4 days where our daytime HIGHS were -16 degrees!

Our child had used one of the bathrooms and went to flush a toilet, and it wouldn’t flush.  We found out that our pipes had frozen.  I’m so thankful for my preps!

We were able to continue to live life fairly normally because of items I had picked up over the years.  I pulled out a five-gallon bucket, snap-on toilet seat, extra heavy trash bags, and kitty litter for our bathroom.  We set them up in our main floor bathroom.  My daughter affectionately nicknamed it the “privy.”

I pulled out our five-gallon water container with a spigot and put it by our kitchen sink. We did our “business” in our half bathroom, headed ten feet to our kitchen sink, and washed our hands using the spigot of the five-gallon container.

We brought up a case of water bottles for drinking water and used only our paper goods and plasticware to eat.

Our frozen pipes are under our garage. We took our Buddy Heater out to the garage to try and heat it with. We needed four D cell batteries in order to run it. I had everything tucked away “just in case.”

I’d picked up these things over the course of several years as part of our food storage journey, but they all came together to turn what would have been a trip to a hotel and extra money spent into a slight inconvenience.

Is there a situation where you were prepared for a minor or major emergency – whether or not you planned to be?  What was it?  How were you prepared?