Sleeping bags, all sizes of bunks

[papaof2]

sellout.woot.com/plus/disc-o-bed-for-the-family-7?ref=w_cnt_cdet_sell_dly_wobtn

Ends midnite 23 Feb

[feralferret]

I had no idea that they made such beds. Those would be great for a small cabin.

[papaof2]

Or to make space in the basement for the horde of family that remembers you might have food and water when SHTF :-(
If any of ours turned up during a no power, no municipal water, etc, event, they could have the two bedrooms upstairs (queen bed, pair of twin beds, sleeping bags on the floor and maybe an air mattress if they can find and patch the hole in it). The queen TempurPedic mattress might be worth fighting over. The twin mattresses are Extra Firm and only slightly softer than a sleeping bag on the carpeted floor. Of course, no power means no heating or cooling up there. No municipal water means no running water up there. I have several options for heating the main level but they would NOT heat the upper level - this house is old enough to have real doors that could close the main level off from the upper level and shrink the space on the main level that needed to be heated - already worked that out when the gas-fired furnace for the main level died in a January with highs in the 30's and lows in the teens. With judicious placement of some quilts and blankets over room openings that don't have doors, we could shrink down to a space that the 22,000BTU kero heater can heat. I would consider trying to pump diesel from the underground tanks at the nearest gas station and mix diesel and kero for that heater - there's one 12 volt pump that's rated for water and diesel. Probably shorten the heater's wick's life some but the kero heater is more useful delivering heat than when not delivering heat and I have at least on spare wick. Or I could make 20lb propane tanks into small stoves that would fit in the fireplaces (main level and basement) and burn whatever wood is available - I even have some metal "gas water heater chimney" that could be run between the top of that stove and fireplace's damper opening. That would require shrinking the "lived in" space because it would be a small stove with limited heat output. I have some firebrick left over from the house's construction which would go in the bottom of those tanks to increase their useful life because the bottoms wouldn't burn through as quickly.

No, we don't have food for them. No, we don't have water for them - unless they put 5 gallon jugs in the wheel barrow and walk it 2 miles horizontally and 200 feet vertically on the road to the nearest creek and then get that much water back up that distance. That would be serious work for someone in excellent physical condition :-(
8.3 lbs/gallon for water * 10 gallons = 83 lbs + weight of jugs + weight of wheel barrow. The downhill trip would be long. The uphill trip would be long and HARD. I do NOT have pumps that can provide that much lift or push water through a couple miles of hose or 1/2" PVC pipe - might find a couple miles of underground sprinkler pipe if you had access to enough home centers but unless you could bury it for the entire distance, it would disappear as fast as you put it down.

There is an older neighbor with a covered in-ground pool but that water might need as much filtering as the water from the creek. Even the 10 lbs of activated carbon I have for filtering water would have a limit of maybe 5000 gallons... Need that type of filtering for cooking, drinking, First Aid and so forth. Boiling water to clean it needs heat and while I have a Fresnel lens that could heat a large pot if it's in the sun, we can have 10 days without sun in any month so other sources of heat would be needed.

Lots of things to be covered when/if you don't have "always there" services such as clean water...