10:51 – We spent yesterday up in Sparta looking at houses. We decided to put in an offer on one of them. It’s a beautiful house, sitting on about 1.5 acres of level ground that gets plenty of sun. It’s a short sale, which complicates matters somewhat because the bank is involved.
The house was built in 2006, but it was built right, with solid cherry floors on the main level, cherry cabinetry and good built-in appliances in the kitchen, and so on. The primary heating and AC is via heat pump, but there’s also a ducted woodstove in the basement that can heat the entire house if necessary.
One of the other homes we looked at was obviously owned by preppers. One of the basement rooms had three 10-foot islands of five-shelf 2-foot wide floor-to-ceiling shelving units. Three hundred square feet (30 square meters) of shelves, all filled with canned goods, dry staples, and so on. I don’t know how large the family is, but I’m guessing there was food for one year for a family of six or eight people.
Then as we were driving down the road, our real estate agent announced out of the blue that she was a prepper, and had been all her life. She’s a couple years older than I am, and she said she’d grown up on a farm and she still maintains a large garden, hunts and fishes, shoots recreationally, keeps tons of stored food, has the ability to heat her home off-grid, and all the other stuff preppers do. I wasn’t surprised when she added that that was the norm in Sparta, where even people who don’t consider themselves preppers are semper paratus. It’s just part of living in an isolated mountain town.
So now we’re waiting for the sellers and their bank to approve or reject our offer. We should hear from them within the next few days.