200 Things: Home

By Sharon Astyk. Reprinted with permission.

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If you live in a place where it gets hot in the summer, consider building a screen room (a room with screened windows all around or almost always around), either attached to your house or separate. You can put a wood cookstove in the screenroom and use it as a summer kitchen for cooking and canning, avoiding adding heat to your house. You can also sleep in the screenroom when it is too hot to sleep inside, and reducing or eliminating the need for air conditioning. The room can double in the winter as a woodshed. If you cannot build on, freestanding screenrooms are also a possibility. For sleeping even a mesh camping pavilion or tent under the trees will be better than many houses.

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For those in cold climates, consider a four poster bed. These were once not merely decorative - with heavy coverings for the top and the sides, they could be heated with your body heat, and provided a cozy sleeping space in an era when bedrooms were unheated. A frame can be added to many existing bedframes if you are at all handy, and curtains are easily made. You can also add wall hangings and tapestries as cheap forms of insulation to existing walls. They can be made from old blankets and cheap fabric, or can be as artful as you like.

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Clean and organize your house, and get rid of anything you don’t need. Time is at a premium, and will only be more so in the future. For things that you wish to keep for the long term, pack them up and keep lists of where they are. You may need to find things quickly. Make sure emergency supplies, such as medical items, flashlights, etc… are readily available and can be found in the dark and under stress.

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You’ll save yourself trips in the car and problems in the future if you stock up on fasteners of every kind - commonly used nails and screws, pins, hinges, latches, shoelaces, twine, rope, tacks, you name it - if it holds one thing to another, you’ll want it and running out is a pain. Stash a few extras of everything, and make sure you know where they are.

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Expect if times get hard to consolidate housing with friends and family. Make sure you can live fairly comfortably. Yard and rummage sales are excellent sources of extra blankets, towels, and pillows. Fold up futons, tatami mats, even rolled up carpets make excellent emergency guest beds, and can be stacked and stored pretty easily. It may get crowded, but it doesn’t have to be miserable.

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Pay your mortgage ahead whenever possible. If economic times get hard, and you are unable to pay, the bank will foreclose first on people who own only a little of their home equity. The more payments you can make on your *principle,* the more secure you will be, even if you don’t own the whole thing. If you rent, be a good tenant and establish a relationship with your landlord, who is thus more likely to be accommodating of you in difficult times.

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Make sure you have a reliable source of non-electric water, whether rainbarrels, a cistern, hand pumps on your well, or a community source, such as a public pump. If you cannot easily create a private such source, consider advocating with your community that public water sites, with either manual pumps or solar powered ones be created at local public centers, such as schools, parks and community centers. Use the examples of extreme weather to emphasize the need to ensure a reliable local water system in a crisis.

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Invest in several solar shower bags - there’s nothing like a hot shower, and they can be left in the sun in warm weather or hung in a greenhouse or behind a heat source in the winter. A good sized washtub also has many uses, from bathing kids to doing laundry by hand.

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If you decorate for holidays and special occasions, invest in permanent, sustainable sources, or consider making them. Wreath making, for example, is comparatively simple and many of us have access to local evergreens. Decorate your sukkah or for a birthday party with hand knit or sewn “streamers” made in the shape of intertwined tubes or in roughly the style of Tibetan prayer flags. Festivals and rituals are important - maintaining them sustainably is equally important.

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Time to put in a composting toilet! They can be purchased at places like Lehmans (www.lehmans.com), or you can make one from plans readily available on the web. John Jenkins’ book, The Humanure Handbook is available for sale or internet download, and covers all the relevant issues.

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I know you’ve already converted over to compact fluorescent lights, but have you also converted to LED, solar or hand cranked flashlights? Have you got a solar battery charger and rechargeable batteries for your flashlight? How about a solar charger for your cell phone?

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If you plan to buy a house or land, remember, that an acre is a lot of land. It is easy to get all worried about peak oil and imagine you need 20 acres, but one acre, or half an acre or even a quarter can do an awful lot.

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