Well, after many years in the 1 — 1/2 bed­room apart­ment in North­ern NJ, Ms. Prep­per and I recent­ly moved in togeth­er, and into a new home.  Any­one that has accu­mu­lat­ed any amount of stuff, knows that the mere act of pack­ing your stuff and mov­ing it can be a daunt­ing task.  In this prep­per’s case, how­ev­er, I real­ly did­n’t under­stand how much stuff I had.  More specif­i­cal­ly, I did­n’t real­ly under­stand the extent of my preps.  Nor did I under­stand what it was going to take to move those preps.  In the scope of trans­paren­cy, I real­ly have not put as much into prep­ping as I should have in the past year.  I achieved a cer­tain lev­el of preps, and sort of just plateaued.  I promised myself I would hone some skills as well, and life sort of got in the way and that nev­er hap­pened either.  I’m now start­ing to “sched­ule” my skills train­ing for myself so that I don’t lose sight of what is impor­tant.   You may have noticed by the lack lus­ter num­ber of posts on the blog as well.  But I digress…

On anoth­er note, one of the upsides of mov­ing is that you get to deter­mine what you might actu­al­ly need and what you might not need going for­ward.  That’s huge.  Now the down­side.  As a prep­per, you have a ton of stored clothes, boots, gloves, MOPPS gear, wheat, beans, rice, flour, etc, etc, etc.  You get the pic­ture.  All of you you think you need, just in case…  So, I looked it over, deter­mined that some of the food could go, get donat­ed, etc.  I could replace it lat­er, and I had enough long term stor­age to fill the gap if I need­ed it to.  So that is where I am.  But what was daunt­ing was load­ing up buck­ets, buck­ets, and more buck­ets of food…  I felt like it would nev­er end.  To boot, we’ve moved from a place with a base­ment.  You know, that cool dry place you’re sup­posed to keep your food stor­age, to a home with­out a base­ment, but a crawl space.  So all my food stor­age is in the warm humid garage at the moment, until I can fig­ure out the next step, which may be a cli­mate con­trolled stor­age unit.  But that is not a per­fect sce­nario either.  I’ll prob­a­bly get an air con­di­tion­er for the garage and kill two birds with one stone, keep it cool­er, and kill the humid­i­ty as well.

The oth­er issue I have is orga­niz­ing it all.  I have a garage that is full of stuff still in box­es, and it real­ly does need to be sort­ed out soon, as in the event of an actu­al emer­gency, I’ll be wast­ing a lot of time doing things like dig­ging out a propane heater or the gen­er­a­tor that is cur­rent­ly buried.  All of this takes time.

Back to the move.  I had orig­i­nal­ly planned on mov­ing all my preps myself.  I want­ed a high­er lev­el of OPSEC.  Real­i­ty kicked in though with some busi­ness trav­el and bare­ly enough time to pack, so the preps got moved with every­thing else.  That said, many preps were in card­board mov­ing box­es or in opaque plas­tic bins.  The movers had no clue what they were mov­ing.  Oth­er preps were in five and six gal­lon buck­ets clear­ly marked as wheat, flour, beans, and oth­er types of long term food stor­age.  Can you say oops.  So much for OPSEC, as any­one that watched Dooms­day Prep­pers or any oth­er pre­pared­ness show would know exact­ly what it was.  They asked, and I said I did a LOT of camp­ing, and tried to rein­force it with my three var­i­ous size tents, and many sleep­ing bags.  I’m not too sure they bought it.

As for guns, ammu­ni­tion, gaso­line, and oth­er items a mov­ing com­pa­ny pro­hib­it, I did move myself the day before the offi­cial move.  I did­n’t want any­one to see them or how many of them.  Good thing the neigh­bor­hood we bought the house in is rel­a­tive­ly qui­et.

We’ve been in the house now for almost five months.  Every­time I look in the garage, I cringe at all the work there is to do.  My mis­take was not hav­ing a sol­id plan around mov­ing and orga­niz­ing my preps.  Had I had the time, and access to the house ear­ly enough, I would have moved the preps ear­li­er, orga­nized every­thing, and felt more com­fort­able about it.  Mean­ing, I real­ly need to get my Bug Out Bag off the floor in the fur­thest cor­ner of the garage so that it is acces­si­ble, get the gen­er­a­tor out so that it is acces­si­ble, etc.

The moral of the sto­ry is, have a plan to stay orga­nized, and stick to it if you plan on mov­ing your preps to a new home or a new loca­tion.

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