THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

GreyQueen

I've done wallpapering, precisely two drops. Mum was teaching me how and then carried on the work. My two strips were both ruined when she had a new socket installed on that wall not long after and the wiring was chased in.

She re-did them and I stick with paint - much easier.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/rice-cooking-arsenic-traces-poisonous-boil-water-away-drain-excess-danger-food-a7568436.html?cmpid=facebook-post

I didn't know this... about rice..But I have always said.even though our country has banned certain pesticides on food crops. But yet we import food from countries that use all sorts...

thriftwizard

Hahaha! Whoever built this house, a mere hundred and sixteen-ish years ago, had never heard of straight lines. Wallpaper, with the exception of wood-chip, is a total nightmare, although I did get away with a little under the stairs. So our predecessor Artex'd everything - nightmare! We've been threatened with listing, as apparently we live in an area of "special architectural interest" but as this house has been extended & altered about 5 times, the threat was more funny than serious. But the big apple tree, never in the slightest danger from us, did get a preservation order slapped on it...

About the rice - I was born & lived the first few years of my life on the western edge of Dartmoor, and my father's family have come from that area since time immemorial. The place is riddled with ancient amethyst and silver mines and the groundwater contains a fairly high proportion of arsenic quite naturally. Which means that we should all have enviable skin, and apparently I'd be quite hard to poison with that particular substance. Just as well, as my parents spent a number of years in India before I was born (Mum's family having lived out there on & off for about 200 years) and I grew up eating curry & rice at least once a week, a tradition which I've been very happy to continue. But we always cooked the rice in gallons of water, then rinsed it to fluff it up before serving...

COOLTRIKERCHICK

I put the rice out of the packet into a scive. Rinse under the tap. And then book in water. I always rinse when cooked. To get rode of the 'gloopiness' of it as I make crap rise lol..

DawnW

GreyQueen wrote: »

I've done wallpapering, precisely two drops. Mum was teaching me how and then carried on the work. My two strips were both ruined when she had a new socket installed on that wall not long after and the wiring was chased in.

She re-did them and I stick with paint - much easier.

My mum taught me to wallpaper too GQ, and I have used these skills often, in grotty old tied cottages with walls that desperately needed replastering, but didn't get it. When we bought this place, also old with wonky walls, we did / had done replastering as needed, but the walls are still not square or straight and I find paint much easier too, these days. I found a random small pattern the easiest to deal with back in the day, rather than stripes which look really strange if the walls aren't straight, or a large pattern that is hard to match up.

DigForVictory

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

there is not a straight wall in the house

Dead right too! In order to fit the kitchen, the builders had to do a complex stud & plasterboard job to make one end of the kitchen "square enough" - end result, we use it as a place to cook only & hang out in other rooms with a reassuring lurch. When Himself wins a Lottery, we'll take the (very nice) units out, & go back to standalone pieces in a likely bigger & cheerfully lopsided kitchen!

There's one beam in our house that had the surveyor sweating a bit, as it runs halfway across & then stops. A decade on, we've stopped worrying about it - the lads have grown & yet it's all still standing? Success!

As for the Avoiding Listing bit, I agree wholeheartedly. You can conceal the past if so minded (see soulless kitchen above), but being required to keep everything in aspic is for the National Trust. Buildings grew & changed over time according to the occupants' needs wants & budgets. Pegging something to one moment seems downright unsporting in a living building.

monnagran

Oooh! DawnW, I am so with you on wallpaper.

When my eldest son was a teenager in the early 80s and going through his goth stage, (time healed the wounds but has never erased the scars) he wanted me to wallpaper his very large bedroom. His wallpaper of choice was thin diagonal stripes of grey, red and black. The room was VERY large. No walls were square. There were alcoves and 2 chimney breasts. The wallpaper was cheap and stretched when wet with paste.
I did it. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER again.

I was really proud of that room when finished. There were one or two places where the stripes did not quite match exactly but a blind man would have been glad to spot them.
Nothing in the wallpapering line would frighten me after that.

I will gloss over the fact that he then removed his curtains and pinned black bin bags over the windows. He is 48 now and relatively normal.
Parents of teenage boys read this and sigh with relief!

x

[Deleted User]

I've had a reassess of what I need to have by way of preps. I'm going to sort through everything we have and get rid of most of what I've been squirreling away by way of equipment and really reduce the number of different types of food I've squirreled away in the store room. My thinking is that if we are stuck in situ we have the garden, the allotment is only over the road and we have the indoor and outdoor woodstoves and the wood, so cooking, heating and hot water are readily achievable. Food stocks need reducing, gourmet is NOT necessary, survival IS so pasta, rice, instant mash, tins of veg, meat, fish, fruit and instant soups/noodles things of that ilk for adding boiling water to will all still have a place along with flour, sugar, salt, tea bags coffee, oil but not instant custard, jellys, chocolate, biscuits, sweeties and luxuries. It will make the whole prepping 'thing' easier to maintain and give me a bedroom back which is currently almost unenterable because of what I've deemed necessary over the years. Equpiment wise, I've good sleeping bags, a foldable wood burner, mess tins, tin openers, nesting cutlery, enamel plates, bowls and cups and billy cans all light enough to transport easily on foot, if we're here we've beds, bedding, all of home. I have a couple of the lighter books one wild food identification, one compost loo and shelter type of instructions, how to get clean drinking water etc. to take but here we have a small library. I think less is more if we have to relocate and I don't need 'special' prepping equipment IF we're here.

mardatha

That's more or less how I see it MrsL - less stuff but more carefully selected. I'm a minimalist anyway and always get twitchy if I have tons of stuff. Just a reasonable amount of well thought out items.

fuddle

I'm watching kittie's downshifting of kit and will learn from you as you go through the process too Lyn. I'm yet to accumulate useful kit and have felt a bit 'eeek' because kit for just in case I don't have space for because of the kit needed for here and now.

I find the shift fascinating but I am greatful because in doing it you will all reinforce what is important and I can carry that lesson through my life while not being concerned that I'm not prepperish enough. (or translated not hoard useful stuff that maybe isn't as useful in the grand scheme of things)

I too get twitchy if I see stuff accumulate Mar. Everything needs to have a place and has to earn it's useful right to be in my home. For me a tidy house is a tidy mind (and healthy in terms of coping). So as you can see I've been a bit torn between to prep (in accumulation terms) or not to prep.