How Building a Garden Shed Can Teach Valuable Prepper Skills
Taking the time to teach your children valuable life skills will always be rewarding. Whether you are working together to learn how to tie useful knots or to teach them prepper skills, you know that at some point in their adult lives, your kids will benefit from, not only the time together, but the knowledge you instilled in them.
Believe it or not, building a garden shed can teach valuable prepper skills. Learning the basics of the building structure, what to stock in the event of an emergency situation, and how to properly store food, are all critical life skills that your children will one day appreciate. Here is what you need to consider when building a preppers garden shed.
Building the Shed
A garden shed does not have to be complicated. Decide with your family how big you want the prepper shed to be and plan out the dimensions.
Some additional things to take into consideration:
- What you want the floor to be made from
- The length and width of the shed
- How big you want the doorway to be
- How tall you want the shed to be
- If you want a slanted roof or something similar to a house
- If you want to use a kit shed or build it from scratch
- Whether you want built-in shelves or metal shelves
- What you will use to secure the door
- Where to build the structure
Each of these items will teach your children: how to properly create a structure on your own, planning what building supplies you will need, how to take measurements, and how to pre-plan.
Build Your Shed – It’s Actually Easy
Make it a family event so that everyone can learn. You will all be surprised at how easy it is to build a shed using shed plans online like this 12×20 shed plan from 3dshedplans.com. These plans make it an easy and quick project.
Setting Up Your Shed
Once your shed is built, you now need to stock it. Talk to your family about what items would be beneficial to have during an emergency situation. Also talk about where you will store the items, and how you will store them.
Items that you should consider storing:
- Flashlights
- Batteries
- Canned food (and a can opener)
- Water
- Blankets
- Matches
- Activities (playing cards, books, etc)
- Radio
All these items will need to be stored properly to ensure that they are viable, should you need them. Plan with your family how you will store things like blankets. Will you put them in plastic containers so that mice and bugs cannot get into them? For the canned food, what types of foods will you store? Also, how often will you rotate out the food with newer cans? This is important so that you aren’t eating expired food should you need the supplies. Whose job will it be to check expiration dates? What system will you use? Each of these are great learning tools for your children.
Further Considerations
Some other points to consider when building your prepper shed will be:
- Should it have a basement? How will you get clean air into it?
- Long term food supplies. If you need to hunt for food, what supplies will you need for that, how will you clean the animal, and where will you cook it?
- How will you get water should your supplies run out?
- How will you manage toileting and waste removal?
You will also want to teach your children that in order to build new structures on your property, you often need building permits. Bring them to your local town hall and have them meet with the building officials. Discuss what needs a permit and the best way to build a long-lasting structure. Talk about if you “hide” your shelter, what needs to be considered to make it safe.
The more time that you spend with your family, teaching and doing hands-on projects together, the stronger they will be as adults. There are so many great skills that can be taught when building a garden shed for prepping. These skills will be greatly beneficial as they are skills that they will use in their everyday lives. They will also know the basics of structure building which is a must.
