How We Became Homesteaders

Hm-m-m.... Where do I begin? Well, if you have been following my other blog, www.aviewfromthecottage.blogspot.com then you have probably read how we got started with prepping. But in case you didn't get to this blog from the cottage blog, I will give you a synopsis of how we came to be where we are today.

 Ceiling down and water standing in the floor
 days after the hurricane. Circa 1989

In 1989, when Hurricane Hugo came through and made pick up sticks of our home, we were in the middle of adding on a bathroom, laundry room and 3 bedrooms to a circa 1944, 750 sq. ft. house we bought 18 days before. We had the new construction "dried in" by the time the hurricane hit, but that was not enough protection to keep the high winds, floods and rain from wreaking havoc on the house and our lives. It took us years to recover. Financially, we were up to our ears in credit card debt, since insurance didn't cover any of the new construction, or the fact that we had to rewire and re-plumb the entire house. With nowhere near enough insurance money to cover the cost of rebuilding, we had to do things little at a time as we could afford to, and when it was something that just couldn't wait until we could afford to begin work, we had to put it on the card. Ouch. Fortunately, once we were given our official Certificate of Occupancy, we could roll all that debt into a mortgage, and eliminate the outrageous interest payments we were paying for carrying so much debt on credit cards.

New construction standing in water after the hurricane

  The Certificate of Occupancy was kind of a joke, since we had been living in the rubble/construction since shortly after the hurricane. For 8 months we had no power or water, I prepared our meals on an old Franklin wood burning stove, that wasn't designed to be used as a cook stove, but we made it work... we had a make shift toilet in the woods and the kids and I bathed from a bucket or from the sink at a convenience store that friends owned, Da showered at the work out room at his place of employment. We worked day and night, Da worked all day at the office, while I measured, cut and numbered lumber for him to knock into place when he got home, we ran wire, laid plumbing, built interior walls, stapled in insulation and hung sheet rock all either by lantern, or when the extension cord a neighbor ran from their house to ours wasn't used to run a single power tool, we could plug in a shop light to illuminate our work area. While we were doing all these things, we had a 7 year old and an infant that needed care, clothes to wash, food to prepare, all with no power and very little time.

N. my oldest son helping with the reconstruction.

E.M helped, too.

We also had very little money to buy food, so our meals were very humble and were made in one pot either on the wood stove or in a dutch oven over an open fire outside. We washed dishes in water we hauled from a neighbors well spigot and drank bottled water. We had no heat that first winter, the chimney that vented the wood stove had been damaged during the storm and the stove smoked like a freight train. So we couldn't heat with it at night and only during the day when we weren't in the room with the stove. It was really futile to try and heat anyway since some of the floors were open to the ground and one gable was still open to the sky... It was a long cold winter.

Master bedroom

  Eventually, we were far enough along to refinance, but nowhere near finished with the house. Most people in our area were out of power for 3 weeks, we had no power for 8 months, most every one else was back to life as usual in a month or so, for us... our baby was three when we got interior doors, he was 5 when we finally had floor coverings. My sink was on 2x4's in the kitchen for 2 years, but we did have indoor plumbing, a stove and a fridge within the first 2 years. It  looked to others like we were back to normal. Ha! That is because we had a car in the driveway,( instead of the deuce and a half dumper that we were filling with pieces of our house and driving to the landfill), and we had a front door instead of a tarp, but inside things were anything but normal. Two years later there we still had rooms with no sheet rock on the walls, we all slept in one room for a year, since the rest of the house was still a construction zone. We breathed the sawdust, insulation, and sheet rock dust while we lived and constructed in the same space.

Since we had to completely gut and redo the 1944 part of the house we took the opportunity to make some modifications. We reconfigured a couple of small rooms to be a big open kitchen/dining/family area that echoed the look and feel of the bedroom addition. We vaulted the ceiling and put in skylights to add extra light and make the space feel bigger. In a way, the hurricane allowed us to have a much nicer design to the total house than we would have had otherwise.

E.M. was 6 months old and N. was 7 yrs. when Hugo hit in September of 1989. This photo was taken in April of 1992, E.M. was almost 3 yrs. and N. had just turned 10. They spent a lot of their early childhood living in a construction zone.

In time though, the sense of the urgency kind of faded and we began to take stock of what happened and how we had survived. It was during that time that we decided that if we had any control over it, we would never be caught without the ability to feed and shelter ourselves again. Even before we were finished with the rebuilding of our home, my husband and kids, 11 and 4 by this point, built an outdoor pantry and we began to stock it with enough food to last us for 6 months. That was the beginning. Now many years later we have an entire system that we call Pantrykeeping, that we use to manage our stockpile and keep everything rotated and in stock. We have a large garden that we keep in production 365 days a year, a variety of perennial fruits, and we continue to practice and hone our homesteading, self-sufficiency skills. Being prepared has become a way of life and every day is a prepping day.

So, with a little background on why we prep, I will in the next few post begin to lay out how we prep. It doesn't take SHTF of TEOTWAWKI kind of events to set life on its ear, it could be a personal crisis, job, loss, illness, or an Act of God. Don't let life catch you unprepared... If you have a survival story of your own, please leave a comment and share it with us we would love to hear from you! Until next time!