[Redcap]

Okay, this may be overkill, but I had to renew my driver’s license and did not want the star ID, but my license came with it anyway. I have it wrapped in foil in my wallet. 🤣🤣

[Redcap]

I don’t have a cell phone but I do have a laptop. I am getting very close to just getting offline altogether. I don’t like the way this world is going. Better, maybe, to just unplug altogether and go on living like people are supposed.

[Redcap]

Considering the amount of pecan and maple seedlings I just picked out of my yard last weekend, I can definitely understand that. We have tons of squirrels in our trees. We cal them “chicken of the tree” and are happy to let them get good and fat and reproduce…..just in case.

[Redcap]

Not a fancy system by any means. It is just papers on a clipboard that I keep clipped to the wire shelves where the items are. The pages have the categories (meat, dairy, sugars, etc.), sub-categories (items), package sizes (pounds or ounces)and how many of each of those, their expiration dates, number I have total, and the number of units (pounds or packages) I want to have for my time goal (mine is one year). It’s just a handmade spreadsheet on lined paper.

I like having one year as my goal because then I can easily translate that to 1 1/2 years or 2 years when I look at my total of what I actually have.

On the pages, I write categories like MEAT and then subcategories: canned beef, tuna, sardines, etc. The frozen meat is a list ON the freezer door so I don’t have to go elsewhere to find the inventory list. There’s a pencil attached with string on every clipboard and taped to the freezer door so I can adjust it as I use or add to it. We just have the small side-by-side fridge freezer so it’s not much. I don’t keep up with the freezer meat well so I just inventory it every couple of months and make a shopping list. I try to keep 30 lbs. of meat in the freezer at all times and 10# of unsalted butter for the next batch of shelf-stable ghee.

The only reason it works for me is because of the time I put into organizing the storage to begin with, keeping the lists right where the foods and supplies are, having clear goals regarding amounts of each item or type of item, and keeping like items together and not mixed up. Salt, homemade jam, honey, spices, canned meats, dehydrated veg, etc. all have their own space. I can’t just throw things on shelves and think I’m going to be able to find it later.

It’s a little labor intensive to set up because I also write the expiration dates on every can or box of food and then shelve them stacked with the more recent dates at the front to be used first. Every Jan 1 and maybe again in July, I move the ones that should be used that year to the kitchen pantry shelves and restock and yes, move them all so the newest stuff is at the back.

<font face=”inherit”>But those are easy to find because I have expiration dates listed on the papers. So around Jan 1, 2023 , I just scanned the papers for anything that was still 2022 and anything that has dates from Jan to July or so and then I go move those. I don’t have to look through EVERYTHING to find them.</font>

That said, I have expired iodized salt, but I’m not worried about it. Salt lasts a long time. Some things don’t need to be rotated just because they are expired. Besides, if there was a zombie invasion, I’d be fine eating ten year old salt down the road so I think I can eat 2 year old salt now. LOL

For non-food items, I have tubs labeled in Sharpie on a wire shelf in the laundry room. There’s a tub for candles, flashlights, and matches. A tub for tape, glue, zip ties. A tub for bungie cords, laundry line, paracord, string and twine. I have all the first aid and personal care (soap and shampoo) in half gallon Ball jar boxes so bottles are standing up, well contained, AND accessible. Smaller items are grouped together in these sort of half-as-tall plastic shoeboxes, like toothpaste, floss, and toothbrushes in one for example. Because they are all in one place and accessible, they are easy to inventory and again, the inventory lists are right there.

The clipboard subcategories also get details where necessary, like lightbulbs. Instead of “sizes”, I have wattage of lightbulbs and the subcategories might be soft white, daylight, appliance, or nightlight bulbs.

So how they are stored has made a huge difference in how I was able to track the inventory. It was a nightmare before I organized them in easy to use containers. When they were just all on shelves without being in categories, it was awful.

It was also hard to keep up the inventory list when I was getting one or two things here and there on shopping trips. So I grabbed the list of how many I wanted on-hand and weekly I just finished a lot of categories off over last summer, like duct tape and packing tape, then glues, then soap and toothpaste and floss, lightbulbs and batteries, etc. I finished my household, first aid and OTC, and personal care supplies and now I just don’t think about it. If I use something or open a glue, I put that on the shopping list and get another.

I hope that helps. I think the worst part is when you haven’t pinned down what you really want to have vs. what you think you “should” have on-hand and when you haven’t yet reached any goals so storage is still just a lot of random stuff on shelves. Once you get some categories done, it starts to get easier.

[Redcap]

Fabrics and really anything that involves creativity as well as functionality is really hard to sort out. I am also a stitcher.

[Redcap]

The bedroom is one of the “last” rooms so it’s the only one that isn’t also a hallway to another room. It’s very bare and peaceful.

As for getting rid of stuff, we are actually very much going Little House although earlier in history…more like colonial/medieval. Not to say we won’t use more modern tools and methods, but I mean to say we’re not storing an extra fridge or going solar (due to the fact that it would be a useless expense if within a couple of years we couldn’t replace the batteries or a cracked panel). We are preparing for the actual simplest off-grid lifestyle should it come to that. Foraging, growing roots and tubers, raising small meat animals and laying hens, washing clothing in rainwater and hanging it to dry, wood heat. You don’t need much equipment for that. Just a few of the right things.

[Redcap]

I have an inventory process that has failed a few times. Haha! But now that I’ve made a better food plan and gotten a handle on things, the inventory list is easier to maintain. I hate knowing I have things we need and can’t quite remember where I stored them. Now it’s all much easier – and labelled!

[Redcap]

👍😄

[Redcap]

We sound like mirror images!

I am also easily parted from “stuff”. My husband, not so much

He takes everything that comes free. EVERYTHING. And he can’t get rid of anything once it crosses that property line. It can be fencing scraps, pallet wood, old broken wooden chairs.

We moved back to the US with nothing so we got a little furniture, but then got better furniture when my dad died and my stepmom moved and wanted new. It was like pulling hems’ teeth just to get rid of two old armchairs we didn’t need, didn’t match, and had no room for. There’s still some end tables, lamps, and those cube units to move along, but I can see the discomfort on his face with “I’m going to give these away or sell them.” We have nowhere to store furniture except an outside shed where it will get moldy or filthy. And we don’t need them. And there’s no room for them.

He doesn’t mind living in a storage unit. I do.

We buy so little packaged food, we have lived in our home for 6 years without trash pick-up. You have to pay for it. It’s a small town with no city trash pick-up. We might have half a grocery size bag once a week and I take it to the Walmart trash. But I just ordered trash pick-up for three months (the minimum) so we can clean this place out from the broken stuff he’s allowed on the property, things we’ve collected and don’t use like used thin seedling trays that are crumbling in the shed, old suitcases we’ll never use again….Things are stored away, but I’m over it. LOL

[Redcap]

That’s a great idea. We have a space on the north side of the house I thought we could dig into and store food, but it turns out it’s filled with rock and all kinds of obstacles. The rest of the yard is pure rock an inch down, so my plans to store food outside have been foiled.

“The battle is real.” Yes! I fight my instinct to own nothing all the time.

And now I have a shelf brimming with thrift store and yard sale books for “the end of the world”. Drives me nuts every week when I dust it. It’s the clutter of things I have for “someday”. That’s why I’m working on decluttering, NOT just moving it out of view and creating clutter elsewhere, but getting rid of some stuff and then storing things I don’t need to see daily.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by  Redcap.

[Redcap]

No, it is not LINUX or UNIX. It’s an Apple laptop which is as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft when it comes to being tracked.

Only my utilities and insurance bills require me to go online, but I could always use the library computers once a month to pay them and still not have a laptop.

It’s such a waste of time, this thing. When I put music on my stereo, I get tons done, but the second I open the laptop, I’m sucked into a world I don’t want to live in for four hours at a time and not even feel time pass. I am so over it. 😛

[Redcap]

I love the More with Less cookbook. I used it more when I had kids at home.

[Redcap]

Amazing that you canned so much meat! Well done!

I ended up buying canned beef to get a start on things. I don’t pressure can and wanted to at least have meat on the shelves.

I have bad pressure cooker karma. I have used one about 8 times, three of those times with my grandmother and two different friends walking me through it, standing right there and saying yes, that’s perfect….and then it blows anyway. EVERY. TIME.

So I’m not allowed near pressure cookers or canners. LOL

I also have a lot of butter in the freezer. I’ll collect pounds of unsalted butter and then periodically make jars and jars of ghee to have on the shelves.

[Redcap]

Will this grind coarsely or only make a fine flour?

[Redcap]

I’m the same. Every year I think I’ll just go ahead and get a small chest freezer (we don’t have room for much more than a 5 cubic foot one) and at least put by for me and the husband, but I just can’t see being MORE dependent on power both financially and with the risk of losing it in an outage. I have quite a bit of food already in our 22 year old side-by-side fridge freezer but I’m not ready to add to the mix. That’s why I have also switched to dehydrating as a main food preservation method. I just feel that the less dependent the methods can be, the more secure we are.