The Most Boring (And Most Important) Preps You Can Make

When people think “preparing” they often think of the coolest possible bits: bug-out bags, cooking your foraged feast over an open fire, gas masks, compound bows, personal drones, the zombie apocalypse. That’s great! That stuff is extremely fun and cool, but it’s not all there is to being prepared.

I’m afraid it’s not even a large component of being prepared.

Most preps – some of the most important ones I can think of, actually – are so boring and mundane that most people might not even class them as preps. This is doubly true in the UK, where we as a nation don’t go in for the body armour and anti-tank sniper-rifles enjoyed by our more bombastic American counterparts, or the spiky hot rods favoured by post-apocalyptic Australians.

You might throw up your hands reading this list. You might say, “Dan! This isn’t getting ready to survive the apocalypse! This is just being sensible and having your sh*t together!”

And to that, I’d probably say “exactly. The two are the same more often than you’d think.”

The Start Prepping UK Top 10 Most Boring And Sensible Preps Imaginable

1. Make a habit of checking your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms

A free, two-second job that I do at the end of every month, that helps me sleep easier. Just push the button and see if it bleeps – if it does, you’re good! If it doesn’t, or if the sound is faltering, change the batteries.

Considering how little time this takes, and how gigantic the consequences are if you ever need your smoke/CO alarm and it isn’t working… it’s worth the bother.

2. Keep a notebook to track your prepping

I’ll be the first to admit it: I have a head like a sieve. I could forget what I was saying in the time it takes me to say it.

Trying to be prepared for big disruptions means that the complexity starts to pile up, too. We can’t possibly be expected to know what we need to stock in the larder cupboards at all times, as well as the first-aid kit, and the go-bags, and the stuff we need to get, the skills we need to build, and it just goes on and on.

The only way I can stay abreast of everything is by using a notebook (spreadsheets are also good but keep a notebook handy anyway just in case).

With that, I can see what we’ve got, what we need, and what we’re working towards getting. I can divide the work up however I want – by threat (blackout, supply chain disruption, etc), by whatever need I want to meet (warmth, food, ability to perform a task, etc), whatever. I can note our current levels of any given item, the soonest use-by date to make sure I don’t waste it, how long it takes to use… I can trust that things won’t slip my extremely slippery mind, assess lists over time and collect data that will inform my choices.

Plus, I know that all that knowledge is in one place, easily accessible and easy to put into use. I really believe that keeping track of your current and future preps in a document is a hugely important step to levelling up how ready you are, and allows you to operate beyond the limits of what your brain could do on its own.

Speaking of keeping track of things, that brings me to point 3:

3. Keep track of How Long It Takes To Use Things

If you know roughly how long it takes your household to use something up, you can do some quick maths and figure out how long your supplies of it will last. Keeping track of this is straightforward – in your notebook, just jot down the date when a new packet of something is opened. When you finish it, jot down that date too. Once you’ve done this several times for the same item, you’ll be able to work out an average of how long that item lasts in your house in normal, non-emergency times. My advice is to assume the item will go twice as fast in an emergency, but then I am the sort of person to err on the side of caution. Hence the prepping website.

Once you’ve got an average rate of consumption, you’re able to look at your cupboard and work out how long your supplies would last you if you had to rely on them.

You can also use that information to work to meet a goal – having two weeks’ supply of food, enough toilet roll for two months, a year’s supply of washing powder. Whatever your goal, you can now work to meet it without having to just guess.

For some things, this is easy – my dog eats one large scoop of dry biscuits and half a tin of wet food every day, and that rarely varies. This means a tin of wet food will last us two days, and a 12-pack of tins will last 24 days. Calculating how long we could keep the dog fed with those supplies is therefore just “biscuit packet weight/scoop weight” and “cans x 2”.

For other things, with variable rates of consumption, it’s harder – like bin bags, or firewood. That’s why it’s important to track your use over time and work out average rates of use.

4. Get Your Important Documents together

There are some documents that life would be unreasonably difficult without. Passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, driver’s licence, and a few others. If you lost those things, and you needed to apply for… basically anything… you’d have a hard time.

You should find yours, and get them together in a safe place. Ideally, they’d all be in a waterproof bag in a fire safe, so you could just grab them and run if you needed to evacuate, but I know waterproof document bags and fire safes don’t grow on trees.

For most people, these documents will live in a desk drawer or in a box on a shelf – and that’s absolutely fine. So long as they’re in one place, and you know where they are, you’ll be able to get to them quickly if you ever need them – or if you ever need to leave the house in a hurry.

This cost one American preparedness expert dearly when he had to evacuate his home due to an oncoming wildfire. In an interview with 60 Minutes for CBS, he explains that despite being an expert with a plan entirely geared to evacuation, it took him 30 minutes to get into the car. Why? When the interviewer asked, he had to shrug and say “my documents were all over the house. I couldn’t find them.”

5. Know Where Your Water, Power and Gas Shut-Off Points Are

If a water pipe burst in your walls, do you know how to switch the house’s supply off at the mains? If you discovered a gas leak, could you cut off the supply? How about killing the power to exposed wiring or a malfunctioning machine?

This is something you should figure out now, because when you need it, you REALLY need it.

It’s also something to figure out now because it might take a while and you might hit more roadblocks than you’d believe possible in a sane world. For example, every house on my street has its mains water shut-off point under a little metal plate on the footpath, several feet in front of the house, and you need a special metal tool to reach in and turn the valve.

So if, say, the toilet had just exploded, and I was trying frantically to shut off the water at the mains while the house flooded, I’d have to somehow find the shut-off valve that isn’t even on my property, uncover it, and conjure up the right tool to switch it off, all while every wasted second pumps more water into my house.

Yeah, probably something to figure out now rather than waiting until you need it.

(If you have a landlord, you can just ask them – and if they don’t know, you need a new landlord)

6. Go to the dentist

If you can afford it, and if you are in a situation where you’ve got time, and if you can find a dentist that’s even taking new patients, then please, please go for a checkup. I’m not even kidding, that’s pretty important.

Think of it this way: you make sure that your cupboard is full now, while there’s shops and the climate is relatively stable, so that later, when you don’t have access to those sources of food, you aren’t in big trouble. It’s the exact same with your health.

You make sure that you don’t have any growing problems in your teeth and gums NOW, while there are dentists, so that they don’t reveal themselves after you lose access. George Washington was killed by an infected tooth. Just a few hundred years ago, toothache was a leading cause of death – consistently listed among the top 5 or 6 causes of mortality on the London Bills of Mortality in the 1600’s. Check out this one, below, that lists “Teeth” as killing 113 people that week.

A tooth gets a cavity. The cavity isn’t treated as dental care isn’t available. It becomes infected and develops further. The infection causes blood poisoning or sepsis. The patient dies. From toothache.

Making sure you go to your twice-yearly checkups and have any problems checked out as soon as you’re able doesn’t just make you healthier in your day-to-day life – it gives you peace of mind that your teeth won’t kill you at the first chance they get after the societal lights go out.

NOTE: this section involved preparing for a hypothetical future in which people don’t have access to dental care. That is not a hypothetical for far too many people in the UK right now – many, many people can’t get a dentist or wouldn’t be able to see them. If you currently can’t get dental care, the NHS recommends using their Find A Dentist site, calling NHS England’s customer contact centre on 0300 311 2233, or call 111 if you’re in pain.

If you are in pain, you are entitled to see an emergency dentist. Don’t wait for it to get worse.

7. Stay up to date on jabs

Another preventative step, and a key one. If you are due a vaccination, you should get it. The disease you’re being vaccinated against might not be the cause of any disasters, but if another crisis left you stressed, run down, cold, and over-tired? Then getting sick could be a disaster all on its own.

This doesn’t just apply to vaccinations, actually – preventative medical and fitness stuff is a fantastic thing to work into your normal habits, whether you’re stretching or doing a bit of yoga in the mornings to help avoid joint problems and muscle strain, or attending all your asthma review appointments on time and staying on top of pre-existing conditions. Which reminds me, I have to ring my GP.

Look after yourself. Try to keep yourself as well and fit as you can – not just for some possible future crisis, but for your quality of life right now, and the fact that time will pass and the future will come, disaster or not, and you’ll thank your past self for just booking that appointment.

8. GEt The PLace Tidied Up

Imagine going on “Doomsday Preppers” and telling them that one of your disaster preps is “tidying up.” They’d laugh you out of their radiation bunkers.

I’m not joking, though. A cluttered cupboard haphazardly stuffed with random junk is NOT going to work for long-term storage. A child’s room where the floor is completely impassable due to toys and games sets is NOT going to be easy to evacuate that child from in the middle of the night. A kitchen table covered in dirty dishes and crumbs is NOT a good place to do some emergency first-aid.

I know that many people aren’t able to keep their home pristine and that’s not what I’m asking you to do – but making sure that you have clear paths, organised storage, and clean, clear work surfaces will make every single other thing you do easier, quicker and safer.

9. Make Sure You’re Fire Safe

“Jesus Dan, what’s with all the fire safety stuff?”

I said these were boring preps, but important ones, and I stand by that. These are the foundational habits to get into to make sure your everyday life is smoother and safer, but they’re also things that you need to be able to keep up if you want to get into resiliency and preparedness in a more major way.

If you can’t keep your smoke alarm batteries good and don’t know if there’s a fire extinguisher in your house, you have no business making fires with ferro rods, stockpiling fuel or doing dangerous things like using giant bushcraft knives. Without a basic foundation of care and sense, the odds are just too high that you will get hurt, or hurt someone else. So yeah, I’m going to talk about fire safety for just a little more, because it’s sensible and important.

Do you have a fire extinguisher on each floor of your home? It’s recommended that you do – ABC powder is the most versatile and small extinguishers will only cost about £15 online. If you live in a rental, your landlord needs to provide you with a fire extinguisher – if they haven’t contact them about it. They’re legally required to, so you can get it sorted without it costing you any money.

Think about how you’d get yourself and your family out if you woke up in the middle of the night and the place was already full of smoke. Have you discussed a plan with your children or other dependents? How confident are you that you could get out quickly or by alternative avenues like the bedroom windows?

If your main escape route has to be manually locked or unlocked with a key – like most back doors and plenty of front doors are – then make sure to put a spare key by that door. Panicked, with the house full of smoke, in the dark, people might not be thinking clearly about how to get through the door, and keeping the key right there where they can get it might save all your lives.

I’m not just banging on about this for no reason. Modern homes, full of plastics, batteries and synthetic materials, can fill with smoke and toxic gases in a little under 5 minutes, so time is really of the essence – especially since most of us live in apartments or terraced houses, with neighbours who are likely to be freezing and desperate this winter and who may try to use heat sources they aren’t really able to safely employ.

A fire doesn’t have to be your fault to be your problem – a poorly-maintained gas line, shoddy power repair work by the previous landlord’s dodgy handyman, a desperate neighbour trying to use one of those dangerous terracotta-pot candle heaters this winter, it could happen for any reason, but with so many people living so densely together, it is unlikely to stay in just the place where it started.

10. If you can afford it, have home insurance and the photos to back it up

This is probably the most boring one. There’s nothing more boring than sorting out your home insurance. Except maybe taking a picture of every item you own and storing those photos in the cloud or on a memory stick at a friend or relative’s house.

This is important because if something happens to your home – fire, flood, burglary, whatever – it’s unlikely that society will completely collapse at the same time, so society will still be there and you’ll need to find some way to put your life back together afterwards while still operating within that society. Thankfully, one of the things that that society can provide is insurance, which can replace most of your lost or destroyed possessions – but they need to know what you had in the first place in order to replace it.

You can just tell them, but they’ll only give you precisely what you tell them you had – if you say you lost an iPhone, you’ll get an iPhone, but it might not be the iPhone X you lost unless you specifically say “it was an iPhone X”.

As I noted in my How To Start Prepping In The UK In 2022 beginner’s piece, it’s much more straightforward to be able to send pictures along with your claim, and besides, a big photo folder is a good way to actually remember every item you owned.

So, if you can afford it, get home (and contents) insurance, and then, once that’s done, take a picture of every item you’d want insurance to pay for, and store those pictures somewhere where they’ll be safe. On a memory stick at a friend’s house, in a fire safe, in a folder on the cloud, or all of the above. If you ever need it, you’ll be really, REALLY glad you did it.

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