I understand the appeal, a bit, of the whole ‘tiny house’ thing. You’re small enough to be exempt from many building codes, there’s a modicum of portability, it has an “I’m a minimalist’ vibe, and it’s usually cheaper than a real house. Downsides, of course, are the enormous lack of storage, plumbing is often not much better than what you’d get in an RV, and it’s not something that I can imagine anyone wanting to live in full-time. It’d be like a nicely appointed jail cell.
However…I can see an appeal where a hardened, fortified tiny house might make a nice little bolt-hole. Small enough to hide nestled in the gully or trees of a remote piece of property, but ‘full service’ enough to get you back on your feet after two weeks of hoofing it with just the clothes on your back across the post-apocalypse landscape. It would be a …tiny bunker?
Ok, let’s throw ‘tiny bunker’ into google and see what we get.
- An outfit that makes steel bunkers of various sizes.
- An AirBnb that looks rather nice.
- What appears to be a repurposed railroad car
I suppose it depends on your definition of bunker, but a nice little fortified ‘cabin’ of tiny-house proportions tucked away somewhere unobtrusively might make a very nice fallback plan for when you have to beat feet.After all, if you have to flee for your lives to your Beta Site you really arent going to care that it’s only a hundred or so sq. ft. All youre gonna care about is that it has lights, food, weapons, meds, comms, and distance.
Given the ‘OMG this is it!’ attitude going on right now, I bet a ‘tiny bunker’ manufacturer could easily make quite a splash in the tiny house marketplace which has lost its luster as people realize it isn’t the minimallist panacea they thought it was.
Yeah I don’t get the extreme tiny homes, like 200 square feet. They always claim they build the whole thing for like $20K but don’t mention it is sitting on their parent’s $200,00 land property for free. Same with container homes, they have been proven to be as or more expensive to build than conventional small structures but with no flexibility on width or length.
if you want an idea of how small some of those homes are, ikea has some diff sq ft rooms set up furnished with everything…it may seem like you could live that way but if you think in terms of years, it’s not a lot of room and people tend to collect stuff…lots of stuff…you won’t have room for all that stuff…
An example in history: The battle of the bulge was fought in extremely adverse conditions. After a few weeks of wet/cold/hungry any place to be warm and safe with hot food and drink would be a big deal and well worth the cost.
The Russian Front made Bastogne look like a tropical retreat
Kind of chuckled. I was curious where the air bnb was so I expanded the map.
Why, it’s just east of Meat Camp, TN.
The first time I was exposed to the “tiny” trend
was around twenty years ago…A fellow showed up at our hunt club
with a “tiny” home made, (very well thought out and constructed),
hunting lodge/cabin on a trailer.
The trailer was the type usually used to pull an auto behind
a larger pickup. Slept two with a bunk bed. Had a Mr. Heater “type”
wall unit piped to two lp tanks near the tow area. Storage area under
the lower bunk bed, as well as storage for gear in strategic locations
throughout the interior. A fold down wall table with bench seating too.
Storage also in the bench seating. What I found nice was it also had
an awning which folded down to lock out access to the entrance door
when in tow or not in use. A couple of small windows were incorporated
into the design for all the obvious reasons. The cabin was constructed with
T-11 siding. All stick built but light weight. Very impressive. Not including the trailer I guess he had less than 2k in it. So there you go…no title or deed,
built incognito, and could be placed nearly anywhere.
One could add upgrades of sorts to resist “lead penetration” such as kevlar
cloth incorporated in the walls. And other super secret stuff as well.
Oh, the lighting was 12v and ran off of two marine batteries with solar panels.
Strands of Christmas lights with clear bulbs provided plenty of lighting.
Hmmm….using bullet-resistant fiberglass panels as sheathing, with “standard siding” over it for the visuals, maybe. Looks like “some sort of shed” especially if it’s “dilapidated” might avoid scrutiny. Maybe an insulated projectile-resistant structure inside a well-dilapidated exterior shell. IIRC, most jurisdictions set 200 sq ft or less as the “no permit required” limit…so 2X 10X20 structures, maybe connected with a gerbil tube. Go too small there may be bare minimum living space but no storage room for food/ammo.
An earthbag house would fit the tiny (or not so tiny) bunker market you are describing. Dig it down a few feet to provide the bag fill, put in a cement foundation and steps, then build up with earthbags. Sustainable bunker achieved!
Build a shell of concrete + strong large door, cover with earth (not the door). Buy travel trailer rv and back it into bunker as needed. And in the meantime, you have a trailer to vacation in. And if the bunker is secure, you can store stuff there too.
(yes, i know Ventilation/etc blahblahblah.)
Seems to me the Little house concept was marketed to minimalists or someone who wants to avoid paying property taxes and yard upkeep. Because from a Survivalist aspect just get a nicely appointed RV with swing outs and you have more space and portability/location flexibility. True you have to have water hookup and waste disposal thought out but that goes for the tiny house gig also.
this guy hid in an urban environment for years without discovery.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/communities/northshore/news/whitefish-bay/2019/11/22/sheriffs-office-found-4-guns-3-knives-mans-underground-bunker/4229410002/
underground looks to be the way to go but once a fire is lit then the hordes may find it out.
I had a buddy who dug out a ‘cave’ and lived in it thru one winter in east TN. Electrical was from an extension cord from a friend’s house. He said he never had any heat, tho he did have a dog. iirc ground/cave temps in east TN are about 55-56F year round.
And yeah, he’s probably lucky he didnt get caved in.
Funny how much space most people think they need. Our not distant ancestors raised large families, husband and wife along with 5 – 6 kids, in a smaller square footage than the master bedroom and bath of the mini mansions a family of 3 to 4 presently live in. We’ve been convinced we need to have enormous houses and are financing our lives away trying to pay for these space wasters cluttered with crap we were convinced we need but never use. Our 2 car garages are so full of junk our over priced vehicles, the ones that have no monetary value before we pay them off, sit out in the weather.
The modern American mindset is so out of whack with reality it’s no wonder the trash politicians can get and stay in office doing nothing useful for a lifetime getting rich off of us.
Personally I would take a 600 to 800 square foot well designed and structurally sound home over these stick built pieces of shit modern mini mansion marvels any day.
Unless they were the urban poor, our ancestors also often had multiple outbuildings and spent a considerable amount of their time outside, in all likelihood.
I’ve spent time living and prepping in a ~500 sq ft apartment, and can attest that lack space quickly becomes quite a problem in smaller areas. Every corner of that apartment was crammed with books, tools, ammo, guns, etc. The kitchen (a whopping 7×7 or so feet including the counters and and fridge) did double duty as the workshop area. All the food was crammed into a tiny closet. That cramped space made it difficult to clean or stay organized. Personally, I’d love to be cursed with too much indoor space, if just for the novelty of it.
I would imagine the majority of our ancestors were rural to what’s now considered suburban and with the possible exception of a garage, which they actually used for its real purpose there weren’t any outbuildings except for a chicken coop that probably also served as a milk shed .
I don’t know how old you are but I’m old enough to remember visiting grandparents that still lived in the home my father along with his 4 brothers and 3 sisters were raised in. The house was about 650 to 750 square feet, that’s right 10 people living in that space. a reasonable sized kitchen that also was the living room, 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, it had been updated to accommodate an indoor batroom. There was about a 20 year span between the oldest and youngest child so of course they weren’t all living in the house at the same time but the boys shared a room and the girls shared theirs. No air conditioning or central heating, open windows and an attic fan cooled the house in deep South Louisiana.
You know what the biggest difference between them and the way we live today ? They lived within their means, they found entertainment in doing things outside, the kids played outside, they weren’t staring at a tv or phone , paying for a service who’s main purpose is to sell you junk with never ending advertisements. They raised a lot of their own food with gardens or traded a skill with neighbors.
My grandparents along with other relatives worked together and built each other’s houses so over a several year span 5 houses were built and moved into, No Mortgage except for the cost of property which usually was less than 5 years.
Now I know that’s too far to go back to for the majority of our people and I don’t want to go back there personality either, my point with this is in my opinion there is a whole lot we can learn from and apply. Americans are spending themselves into financial ruin buying those over priced, enormous houses and buying Chinese crap to fill it up while being the most unhappy and suicidal in our history.
So obviously there are many issues at work and we aren’t going to solve it here but maybe we should look within ourselves and look hard at WTF is driving us to this ruinous future.
Have a great week
I was thinking of 18th and 19th century farmers and artisans, who most certainly did did have separate stables, corn cribs, workshops, and, here in the south, often separate kitchens away from the main quarters, in the form of a dogtrot cabin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtrot_house#:~:text=A%20dogtrot%20house%20historically%20consisted%20of%20two%20log,a%20private%20living%20space,%20such%20as%20a%20bedroom. I can’t speak to the mid-20th century.
I don’t disagree with your larger point about our rather materialistic and commercialized culture, I was just trying to point out that 1) there was more to the story than a single small house, and 2) storage room is important. I’m not that old, but I did grow up sharing a room with siblings (eldest of 6), I’m poor and can’t just throw stuff out after one use, and I actually build things for myself instead of just buying everything, so I need room for to store materials and to work in. I’ve been hurting for space my whole life.
I can honestly say that none of my relatives had an outdoor kitchen, corn cribs, stables or many outbuildings nor were artisans. They were what at the time considered average, which in modern times would be considered piss poor. They worked with their hands building, growing and fixing things. My father along with most of his brothers and brother in laws fought in WW2, eventually returning home and went to work for the up and coming oil exploration businesses in Louisiana.
I think many who don’t really know better have an idea that our grandparents and, in many cases for the younger ones here, great grandparents life was a kinda Norman Rockwell painting with the horses, stables and artianship. In reality it was a good simple life but it was also a hardworking one as well. The average Cajun, dustbowl Oki or the West Tx cowboy who didn’t have electricity until they were almost middle aged wouldn’t understand what an artisan lifestyle was, nor would they care. The well off and connected have always been glutinous in every country on the planet but they are the very small minority of the population the rest had to work, hard, for their needs.
Oh and one last thing, while these homes are looking at 100 years old, in many cases, they have withstood the test of some of the worst hurricanes in my state’s history. My memory only goes back to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, I don’t really remember Audrey in 1957, through Katrina in 2005 as really bad storms, came through our area. These simple built homes are still standing, granted with some damage, empty while the 300k houses not a mile away fell and collapsed because modern home construction sucks.
Facts are sometimes hard but no less true.
Looks like something the Chinese workers live in. They are assigned a “pod”. It contains a bed. A chair and table afixed to the wall. There is a tv with controlled programming.
These workers eat in communal dining halls. They use communal shower rooms. They live at their work place. These factories have literally thousands of workers. They make Apple I phones for US distribution. FoxxConn recently opened a factory in China that employs nearly 100,000 workers. Suicide rates at these factories necessitated the installation if nets along the roof lines of the factory.
Confined spaces have a detrimental effect on the human mental state. It causes many to turn inward and retreat from any human contact.