Ready for the ordinary emergency.

Plans, checklists and kid friendly practice runs for families. Built by a dad of five who has needed them.

Start with The First Night

Four pages. Eleven things, a job for every kid, one plan written down and one practice night. Free, and there is not one product link in it.

One email with a link to the PDF. After that we send something useful now and then, never more than a couple of times a month, and you can leave any time.

The free one

What is actually in it

Four pages you print once and tape inside a cabinet door. You may find you already own most of the eleven things before you buy anything.

Page 1

Why one night

The power goes out. The furnace quits in February. The car will not start in a parking lot at five. That is what almost every family emergency turns out to be.

Page 2

Eleven things

Water, light you wear, food nobody has to cook, the fridge rule, one room you can close off, and the car kit most lists forget. With quantities, not vibes.

Page 3

Everyone gets a job

A job for each kid by age, the written plan with the blanks to fill in, and the first ten minutes in the order you should actually do them.

Page 4

What not to buy

Practice night, and an honest page about the things we would tell you to skip. Including a few we could have sold you.

Why any of this

The night the gazebo tried to leave

We had a snow squall with 50 mph winds. Our 10 by 10 steel gazebo, which had been securely installed, started to move dangerously in the storm. The winds turned the canvas canopy into a sail, threatening to damage our garage and cars.

I didn't have a long enough rope or ratchet strap to secure the canopy. One simple prep item could have prevented a real mess. Due to the ice on our patio and the high winds, I couldn't safely stabilize the structure. With my wife inside with our five kids, and the temperature below 20 degrees, I had to act quickly and on my own.

I grabbed my folding utility knife and cut the canopy to reduce the wind resistance, but the steel frame was still moving. My go to prep, a headlamp, let me see the screws in the dark and take down most of the frame, which had already broken. Simple tools, but crucial in the moment. Knowing where those two items were is what saved the time I would have spent digging through drawers.

We lost the gazebo and a few pavers broke. The garage and the cars were fine.

Dan, who runs this. That is the whole business in one bad evening.

What preparedness actually looked like

No amount of training would have helped me be prepared to quickly disassemble a metal gazebo during an escalating storm. But that headlamp helped me tackle it. Easily accessible tools and good organization let me get to work right away.

It didn't look great, but that was preparedness in action. Any more delay, or if I wasn't home, that gazebo could have ripped out and smashed into our garage, or even worse, one of our cars.

How we work

We are going to help you find the headlamp

Almost every emergency a family actually has is small, and it is handled with something cheap you already own, if you know where it is.

So that is what we build. Plans that do the arithmetic for your house instead of handing you a generic list, jobs the kids can actually do, and a practice night that turns all of it from paper into something your family has done once. Nobody here is going to tell you the world is ending.

What we will never do

Scare you into buying something. No countdown clocks, no what-if-the-grid-goes-down. If there is a real storm with a real date on it, we will say so. Otherwise we will not invent one.

Pretend everything needs a link. About a third of the lines in our plans say buy whatever is cheapest locally, because that is the honest answer.

Talk to you like a government pamphlet. Or like a bunker guy. There is a lot of room in between and almost nobody is standing in it.

Being built now

The Ready Family Plan

The First Night is stage one and it stays free forever. The rest is in progress, and it picks up exactly where the free pages stop.

The First Night24 hours · free now

One bad night. Power, heat, water, the car. Over by tomorrow.

The Long Weekend3 days

The storm that closes the road and outlasts the news coverage.

The Long Haul3 weeks

Where fuel, rotation and real quantities start, and where storing more stops being the answer.

Starting Overweeks to months

Fire, flood, tornado. Documents, insurance and the three people who would take you in.

Get the free pages now and you will hear when the rest is ready. No pre-orders, no waitlist theatre, no countdown. It will be finished when it is finished and you will get an email.