Tag Archives: HHG

Article -‘Built by preppers for preppers’: See this Wisconsin compound built for off-the-grid lifestyles

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Set on a dead-end road with vantage points, a shooting range, gardens, apple trees and plenty of lumber, Allen says it would be well suited for someone who wants to be prepared to go off the grid.

“Obviously it relates- it makes a lot of sense now with the way that some people feel about the current state, you know, that we’re in,” Allen said. “The way that it’s built and constructed, it probably would cater to so called ‘preppers’ nowadays.”

Kinda sweet. Someone spent some good money to put this thing together. I rather like the idea of earth-sheltered homes but I always wonder about the long-term waterproofness of such things. I think I’d be more interested in earth-bermed homes. Kinda like those ammunition bunkers where they bulldoze berms on all sides.

Anyway, places like these are always interesting to look at, unfortunately the attention sales like this receive kinda negates a lot of the advantage of a place like this.

This one gets the Harder Homes & Gardens tag.

H/T to the person who emailed me about this.

Article – Homeowner uses ‘one of the oldest forms’ of construction to build incredible fire-resistant house that could withstand the next major blaze

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One homeowner is demonstrating how the best defense against extreme weather events may be Mother Earth herself.

LAist’s Jacob Margolis shared pictures and video footage of an incredible fire-resistant house built into the side of an excavated hillside in Topanga Canyon, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles.

The only part of the structure visible from the outside is the white stucco front face, as the rest of the home is underground, but the inside appears spacious and comfortable.

I have mixed feelings about underground houses. On the one hand, I greatly admire the advantages it offers in terms of security, privacy, thermal regulation , and just general coolness. On the other hand…I like windows and secondary exits.

However, there are some arrangements and designs I see online that seem warmer and airier than the quonset-hut-built-into-a-hill model that many underground homes seem to fall into. For my needs, I think I dont want underground as much as I want bermed. The house in the article above isn’t necessarily underground. It looks like they built it and then put the earth over it to create a new hill. In other words, its not necessarily an underground home as much as it is an earth-covered home.

Regardless, its an interesting example of the type. Food for thought, as always.

Surreal estate: $2m bunker

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In all fairness, this is one of the more nice bunker conversions I’ve seen. But, still, two million bucks is a lot of money. On the other hand, you can ride out a lot of apocalypse in this thing….

Originally constructed in the 1960s at a cost of $4.5 million, an equivalent value today exceeding $34 million, this bunker represents the pinnacle of security and resilience.Its features include formidable 2.5-foot-thick concrete walls, additional layers of earth, EMP-resistant copper shielding, & 2 massive 3,000 pound blast doors.

Inside, the bunker has been meticulously transformed into a luxurious living space spanning two levels.It boasts a modern kitchen, two bathrooms, a spacious living room, and adaptable bedroom arrangements . Complementing these features are amenities such as a gym, a soundproof music studio with recording facilities, a theater room complete with a pool table, an expansive glass blowing studio, and a generous recreation area with soaring 16-foot high ceilings.

One of its standout attributes is self-sufficiency, with a private water well, a new pump, and a substantial 10,000-gallon stainless steel water storage tank, all seamlessly connected to an Aquasana Water Filtration System.The bunker is equipped with an emergency escape hatch and a towering 177-ft communication tower.

It’s cool, no two ways about it. But I’m loathe to live a life where sewage has to be pumped up…I think I’d prefer an above-ground earth-bermed bunker just to avoid having to fight gravity on things like that.

Filed under Harder Homes And Gardens…

Article – Man Buys Abandoned Doomsday Shelter, Discovers ’20 Tons’ Of Supplies Stashed From The 1980s

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Anderson says he found a “fixer-upper” he liked after taking a fishing trip from Atlanta to the Bozeman area five years ago. The bunker only had one hole leading to the surface.

But the man who sold him the house left Anderson something extra. A big extra.

The “nuclear bunker” 20 feet below the entrance was loaded with food and medical supplies. They apparently had been stored since the 1980s, in case the worst happened.

If you think thats cool, imagine what it must be like for the fella that bought the old CUT (Church Universal Triumphant) bunkers from the 80’s.

There’s alot of these kinds of places still out there.

Other article.

YouTube

A show about it.

Link – Descend Into Great Britain’s Network of Secret Nuclear Bunkers

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An interesting article about Britain’s collection of now-disused-and-abandoned bunkers from the Cold War. I’m always fascinated by these types of articles because, in true Jerry Ahern fashion, I’ve always not-so-secretly longed for a hidden bunker out in the middle of nowhere.

We’re standing in a room buried 10 feet below the North Yorkshire moors in northeast England, near the village of Castleton. The wind howls over the hatch above our heads as Hanlon—no expert, just an enthusiast—describes how the room would have been used, as an outpost of English civility and resourcefulness in the face of a nuclear attack. This bunker is one of hundreds just like it, scattered across the country. They’re no longer in use, having been decommissioned for decades, but they’re a nationwide network of relics of fear—a fear that seems never to have left.

The closest thing I’ve ever come across in regards to something like this is an old AT&T fortified microwave relay station in Whitehall MT that I looked at about twenty years ago. It had walls a foot thicj, blast shielding around the vents, and a wonderful flat-topped tower to emplace a .50. Didn’t get it, but there are many of them still out there now in private hands.

Someday I’ll probably just put a cargo container on a slab, encase it in concrete, and call it good. But until then, articles like these give me ideas.

Article – Raven Rock Author Tells Us How Our Government Plans For Its Own Annihilation

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I never get tired of hearing these stories about massive underground bunkers. Go about 1/3 of the way through the article to a YouTube tour of the Greenbrier (aka Project Greek Island).

Over the course of the Cold War, the U.S. government built a massive crescent of continuity of government facilities or sorts. These included elaborate communication sites, personnel bunkers, and command and control posts, ranging from southern Pennsylvania all the way to North Carolina.

Make no mistake, there are dozens of these facilities still out there.Certainly some are kept at a state of operational readiness. Some might even be part of those TREETOP teams.  For those of you who read some of the atrocious ‘survivialist’ fiction of the 90’s, the concept of networks of secret .gov doomsday bunkers and caches was a staple of the ‘Guardians’ series as well as the ‘Deathlands’ series. (Both series, by the way, were entertaining up to a point..that point was usually about 10-15 sequels in before that lack of new ideas would give way to absolutely outlandish changes to previously established fundamentals of the series.)

What is really awesome is that sometimes these ‘decommissioned’ facilities come up for sale to the general public. There’s a big difference between buying an old missile silo and buying a palce that was built, from the ground up, as a place to survive Armageddon.

Realistically, though… unless you hit the Powerball or have an appointment with a bible on Jan 20 in DC, you’re probably never gonna have your own underground nuke-proof city. But…you can always build your own if you’ve the determination.

Harder Homes & Garden: Video- Digging a Secret Tunnel

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The British (or Commonwealth types, I suppose) take a little national pride in their ‘two guys in a shed’ stereotype of entrepreneurship. We Americans kinda started that ball with our ‘company founded in a garage’ model. Heck, I remember when NASA was just two drunk guys with a case of dynamite. Anyway, there’s a channel on YouTube of some limey who does some fairly adventurous creating. Once in a while he does something that I find rather interesting and , perhaps, useful at a later date. Such as the bunker he built under his yard. A nice project, indeed. Not content to just have a hidden bunker, he has a video about digging secret tunnels to connect the bunker to his house. Gotta say, the guy has his act together for discreetly removing spoils and, honestly, doing a pretty titanic job of digging.

I find this sort of thing highly informative and somewhat inspirational. I mean, if you’re going to have an underground bunker why wouldn’t you have a tunnel network to go with it, right? You know, pull up the rug in the kitchen and -presto- trapdoor to a tunnel network that leads to the bunker, the garage, an emergency exit hidden in some shrubs at the edge of the property line, etc.

Major kudos to the guy for building his own tools to do the job. I wish I was that handy.

Harder Homes & Gardens – Hurricanes Destroy Beachside Homes, But Not This One

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Mexico Beach, which sits halfway between the two, saw three-quarters of its homes, municipal buildings, and businesses damaged. But one structure withstood the storm, despite its front step sitting only 150 yards from the wet and windy Gulf of Mexico. Christened the “Sand Palace” by its owners, the blocky beach home survived not by luck or magic, but good design, says Lance Watson, vice president of Southeastern Consulting Engineers and lead engineer on the project. Here’s how—with money and expertise—the crew outmaneuvered Michael, and made this home a model of resilient architecture.

If you build a home on a beach where everyone and the .gov knows there’s gonna be strong hurricanes, it seems that when your house blows away like something out of The Wizard of Oz you really have no one to blame but yourself. However, if you’ve got the resources, and the inclination, you can apparently throw in some engineering to make sure you have the last house standing.

I’ve covered my fascination with concrete dwellings in other posts (search for the HHG tag). But sheer strength isn’t all you need…you gotta have solidly engineered ideas, quality materials, and competent construction. In the example shown in the article, these folks were willing to make some tradeoffs and lose a battle (sacrificing the ground floor storage area) to win the war (keep the house standing).

It’s hard to find old construction that has all the features we wacky survivalists would like to have, and retrofitting an older place can be almost as expensive as building new. I’m inclined to go for a purpose-built place. When it’s time to break ground on Commander Zero’s Post-Nuclear Bunker O’ Love and Lingerie Proving Ground (also known as the Fortress of Derpitude) ypu can bet everything is going to be done with an eye towards surviving forest fire, gun fire, economic meltdown, and as many other forseeable events as possible. Won’t be cheap, I’m sure, but I’ll bet I’ll sleep real good when its all done.

Harder homes and gardens

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I’ve always liked the idea of a little cabin that, while looking rather unassuming and generic, is actually made of a highly resilient material like concrete. I’ve always been fascinated with this product made here in Montana. But, sometimes, for non-residential uses such as secure storage, you don’t really need a nice appearance. And while I have seen plenty of thick-walled concrete structures, the roof is always the weak spot. It seems like you never see a non-flat concrete roof. So, I was surprised to see this in my travels today:

Its a concrete building, about the size of a small cabin, that is used by a local utility for some purpose. But what catches my attention is that the roof is a big slab of concrete. Many concrete structures don’t have concrete roofs…making the roof the weak spot. This baby, however, is delightfully 100% concrete. Forest fires are no problem around this thing.

My use? If I had a place out in the sticks, I’d love to have a place like this as my ‘shed’ where I’d keep my goodies. Trick it out with a more reinfoced entryway (or, better, a hidden tunnel access) and I’d feel pretty happy knowing my stuff was secure.

For a more stylish look, theyre doing amazing things with concrete panles and pouring these days. This one is one of my favorites.

But, for now, I’d settle for a nice chunk of middle of nowhere with a nice concrete building on it like the one shown above. Gotta keep playing that Powerball.

 

Bunker strength, log cabin looks

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I’d made a reference a few weeks ago to the ‘concrete log’ manufacturer out here who sells some very convincing concrete logs to use as building material. They have a cutaway display at the airport that never fails to catch my attention. I was killing time out there the other day waiting for a flight to arrive and took some pics.

Slick, huh? Tell you what, that’d be some primo building material for the deep woods up here. Rain forest or dry forest, it’d be pretty much impervious to rot and flame. And most small arms fire, I’d imagine.