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We have a similar set up as Queen Bee too. We're in the West Va mountains, 20 wooded acres, dirt roads and have had numerous power busting blizzards in the past 30 years. (And we've had bad summer storms and tornado mini bursts that have knocked down trees and power poles for many days too).
We have a 12x 16 foot pantry in the basement middle of our hose, concrete block walls, drain in the floor to the outside, the room is half buried by dirt (house on a steep hill). This room has an outside door on one side, our bedroom is above it with a trap door leading to the pantry in the bedroom's floor. It has over 200 feet of wire shelves from floor to ceiling filled with canned goods, drygoods, paper products, 300 jars of home canned pickles, jams, sauces, toppings etc., also pet food and spare kitty litter with pan, 15 gallons of distilled water, 24 bottles of good wine (it's our wine cellar too thank goodness) and since we use it as a storm shelter, it has emergency cookstoves, pots & pans & dishes, 2 chairs, a bucket w lid for toilet, and enough room for 2 to lay down to sleep, grabbing our bedding and pillows on our way down the small stepladder from the bedroom.
We have 2 generators, the largest one is in a small covered area next to the house and hooked directly into the circuit box. We just have to hit a switch and it runs 6 different outlets throughout the house (not usually all at the same time). One of the outlets is in the pantry room. Another runs the well, another the freezer plugs into, another the refrig in the kitchen, 1 in the bedroom for a space heater etc. We'd have to cut off and drain the houses water lines and hot water heaters to not have to worry about them freezing eventually. We store about 50 gallons of gas, but that goes fast if you are trying to run generators just to keep pipes from freezing. But using the generators off and on just for well water from the closeby outside pump handle, and to turn the freezer on and off (full freezer) and a little TV, a little space heater... it lasts a good while.
We have a large woodstove in the living room that we use most of the winter as it is now- we try to have at least 4 cords of cut split wood going into winter, (our land is well wooded), and we supplement in the rest of the house with hardwired electric heat now.
The pantry, half underground and well insulated, never gets below about 45 most of the winter with no additional heat at all. Hubby, cat & I could live just in the pantry for a month if we had to. Just talking about food in our two refrigerators, upright freezer and canned goods- we could live until spring. We keep 3 large filled propane tanks (like goes with a gas grill, but we use a charcole grill to cook on), we have a small and a large propane cook stove (like to deep fry a turkey outside in) which we could use to cook undercover on our porch which is screened and has opening windows and open vents at the top. We can heat large quantities of water for spot bathing with them too. I know it's safe to use the propane cooker on the porch with the windows and top vents open, because I canned with that setup for years through the summer and fall. Now I use 2 electric hotplates on the porch to can- which we could also cook with by generator if we had to, although we have used the woodstove to cook most things with success in the past. The smaller generator is on the porch too, with one outlet that comes through the housewall into the living room. (Obviously the generator and the propane cooker would never be on near the same time).
Lets see what else- we use rechargable batteries, and we could recharge the most important ones (flashlights, lanterns etc.) with the generator. Our emergency radio is handcranked and stays in and works in the pantry room. We have kerosene lamps throughout the house, filled and clean, though the fumes give me a headache, so we almost never use them. I keep 'plumbers' candles everywhere- they are short fat candles that burn clean for about 5 hours and can be bought cheaply in the camping sections of Walmart or hardware stores. Even small votive candles are handy since they are cheap for large bags of them, and I've used them in sterno cookstoves or in fondue pot stove arrangements to heat up coffee or tea(we also keep a few cans of sterno for the same thing), and also the votives can light up a room quite nicely in a hurry. I use them in small pyrex cups for safety and maximum light.
We have books and games galore.....
Our power goes out quite a lot here in the mountains anyway- so we've done a few other things too. Often the power goes out but not the phone line. We have an older 'land line' phone that we can use for such a time. We just have to unplug the incoming phone cord from the phone that has the answering/fax machine, (the one that has to be plugged into an electrical outlet), and plug the phone line coming in from outside into the landline phone (the one that has nothing plugged into any electrical outlet). Most people don't have a landline phone and don't realize that when the power goes out- so does any pnone that plugs into an electrical outlet. In case the phone line is out too, we already know just where to stand (at the driveway, bent over, antennae pointed exactly over the left side of the barn) to be able to get reception on our cell phone- which we always keep charged and ready to go by the way, to call the power company, phone company, etc. to report the outages.
Our toilet is a composting toilet, but we've used an outhouse, buckets, portable toilets and a hole in the ground too in past emergencies- no problem there.
We keep a few hundred in paper cash, in a fireproof box, along with our most important papers (birth certificates, passports, truck titles, bank papers, credit card numbers etc. We keep the box in the pantry room. We are near 60 now, so we keep our daily prescriptions together in one place, close to the trapdoor of the pantry room. We also keep an emergency medical kit there- bandaids, disinfectant, ointment-the basics.
We have a four wheel drive ATV with a snow plow that quickly attaches on the front. We use it to plow around the house and in a pinch could help us at least get closer to a larger road down our 1/2 mile of driveway.
So I guess we've got the food, water, shelter, light, communication, important document safety, medical and fun stuff covered. It's taken 30 years but we are as prepared as we can be. Just saying that is probably the kiss of death.... I guess the meteor will now fall from the sky directly on our roof.
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