(Before It's News)
When we first purchased our home less than three years ago, it was a charming four bedroom, two bathroom, Dutch colonial bungalow, built in 1920. It was a complete flip, featuring laminate flooring, faux granite countertops, and some, shall we say, interesting additions and subtractions. What I mean by this is that we had a few new walls where there used to not be any and a few original walls that were taken down or partially removed. The home advertised new carpeting, flooring, windows, and siding. Most importantly for us, though, it came with new plumbing, electricity, and mechanicals. The property included a garage and a shed. It was built on a nice, over-sized lot, located in a town of approximately 1,000 people that is over an hour away from any major cities. As a bonus, it has a fairly good-sized Amish community in the outlying areas. This gives us access to a wide variety of hand tools, instructions on getting things done without electricity, and bulk products. While we would have preferred more land further out in the country, we felt that we made the best decision, based on our budget. Since purchasing the home, we have made several discoveries that we believe are greatly assisting us in our preparations.
- Outhouse. We discovered the original, brick-lined outhouse pit and the sidewalk leading from the house to it. We confess that we initially thought that we were digging up the original well. We dug it all the way to the bottom of the brick lining– approximately eight feet deep, six feet long, and four feet wide. Once cleaned out, we refilled it with sand to create a sandbox for our kids to play in. On our to-do list is to build a little “playhouse with a bench” cover for the “sandbox”. If we had to, we could remove the sand with a long hard day of shoveling, cut out the holes in the bench, and reassemble a fully-functioning outhouse with no visual change to our yard and landscaping.
- Bartering Supplies. As a bonus of digging up the outhouse, we also found over 200 glass bottles of myriad shapes and sizes. Based on our research, most of these bottles date from the early 1900’s to the 1940’s. We have over half of the bottles cleaned and categorized. While we do not have any corks or tops for them, we have plenty of plastic and small rubber bands. We believe that they might come in handy for dispensing a variety of goods in a bartering economy, such as: alcohol, medicine, liquid soap, cooking oil, and so forth. All of the bottles appear to be made of a stronger, thicker glass that is fairly durable. After all, it survived being thrown into an outhouse pit, sitting for approximately 75 years, and being dug out with a garden shovel.
- Water Access. As I mentioned, we thought we were digging up the original well when we discovered our outhouse. Since then, we have found the well.
Source: http://survivalblog.com/ten-ways-that-purchasing-an-older-home-is-helping-us-to-prepare-by-c-f/
