Tag Archives: real estate

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.

 

Article – Nuclear missile bunker: yours for less than $400k

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One local newspaper described the sales listing, with calculated understatement, as a “mid-century fixer-upper”: an underground bunker built to withstand a nuclear attack, and to house the fire power to retaliate.

The decommissioned nuclear silo in southern Arizona was once home to the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the US Air Force.

Yawn..another article about a flooded missile base being up for sale, right? True enough. But the 3D virtual tour is utterly fascinating. Highly recommend. It’s like a video game.

I’m still rather partial to the old decommissioned long-line microwave relay stations that dot the US. I looked at one in Whitehall years ago and it was a nice, unassuming little bunker with some serious muscle to it. Ah well…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else whats a heaven for?

Surreal estate

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You know, when youre a survivalist shopping for a chunk of property, there are certain words or phrases in the listing that jump out at you and make you think “hmmm…that might be just the place I need”. You know, phrases like “year round spring”, or “bordered by National Forest”, that sort of thing. Or, how about the phrase “Local lore claims that there are many hidden bunkers on the property holding the needed provisions to protect and support the members of the group. Current owners know of one bunker, have never looked for more.”

Ok, color me interested.

Backstory: about twentyfive years ago there was a happy little religious cult called the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT) that wound up becoming newsworthy when the feds raided one of their properties and basically found them to be building bunkers and stoking them with some rather serious (but mostly legal) firepower. I forget what the original issue was. Anyway, once the leader of the church moved on the whole thing sorta fell by the wayside and, as far as I know, is now just a handful of believers scattered here and there.

Apparently one of their “Strongholds” is for sale.

121.76 ACRES OF HIGH BITTERROOT MOUNTAIN VALLEY, CLOSE TO IDAHO BORDER. SURROUNDED BY FOREST SERVICE; 2+ M. OF CREEK RUNS THROUGH IT! PREVIOUSLY PURCHASED AS THE ‘FINAL HOLD POSITION’ property of the religious sect CHURCH UNIVERSAL AND TRIUMPHANT (“CUT”).

I’ve seen pictures of some of CUT’s bunkers and shelters before. The ones I saw are not the least bit amateurish. At the height of their membership they had the money to throw around. (I remember the news article with ATF pointing out the Barret 82A1’s they had…. not cheap guns.)

I’d imagine the biggest drawback to a property like this is that if the apocalypse does occur, members of the church my come back to claim it. That could be…inconvenient.

Don’t kid yourself, properties with bunkers (and, in some cases, tunnel systems) are not unheard of out here. They’re just usually pretty low profile…but they are out there. A thousand years from now archaeologists will have a hell of a time wondering what sort of civilization ritually buried weapons in plastic tubes.

Link – https://intershelter.com/

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These look very interesting. A couple things jump out at me. First, these seem like they’d be an interesting way to dump a small, easily concealed ‘cabin’ on a piece of remote property. Additionally, since they’re pretty much a ‘kit house’ I’d imagine you can knock it down and transport it if you needed to.

Not sure how much stress the design can handle, but it’d be interesting to use it as a ‘form’ and shotcrete over it or something similar. Byrying it seems unwiae but it looks like it wouldn’t take much to build up some railroad tie berms around three sides of it to make it all but invisible.

Pricing seems reasonable…for about seven grand you can get something that beats being homeless. If a fella had a piece of undeveloped property out in the sticks, this might make a nice weekend cabin sort of thing to hunker down in while you build the primary residence.

Also might make for an interesting ‘dual purpose’ building…plant int on your property as a shed or storage building that can be refitted as temporary housing in a crisis.

As I said, very interesting. I’d like to see one up close.

Tilting Cabins

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I was trolling through Craigslist and found this interesting tidbit. It’s one of those forehead-slapping moments where you think “Why didn’t that ever occur to me?”. Here’s a link to a manufacturer: https://www.tiltcabins.com/design

Floorspace is necessarily small, but I love the vertical element. It has a sort of fire-watch-tower look to it. I couldnt see living in one full time, or for any long length of time really, but it would make a nice weekend cabin for fishing and hunting. I suppose the floorspace is limited by how big a load you figure you can get on the road. Since you’re hauling the thing in a horizontal position, the width of your widest wall will be determined by what you can get away with in terms of a ‘wide load’ on the road. Hmmm.

I do find ‘tiny houses’ interesting from a technical and logistics standpoint, but I could never live in one full time. The only way i could do that is to have it sitting on top of the access stairs to my cavernous underground bunker.

Nonetheless, I really do admire the ‘out of the box’ thinking. I doubt ccargo containers are designed to be stood up vertically, but that was the first thing I thought about when I saw these.

Articles on shelters for the ‘elite’

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Two articles on ‘elite’ shelters on the same day. Makes me think their marketing people must have sent out press releases or something. I maintain that the Vivos thing is like buying a timeshare on Mars – it’s yours..on paper.

Anyway, my skepticism aside, heres the articles:

As we roll down US Highway 41 in Terre Haute, Indiana , my guide insists I give him my iPhone. Then he tosses me a satin blindfold. The terms of our trip were clear—I wasn’t to know where we were going or how we got there.That’s because we’re on our way to the undisclosed location of an underground bunker designed to survive the end of the world, whatever form that apocalypse takes.

And this one:

When the end of the world comes, even wealthy people will not be spared.

Unless, of course, they’ve managed to buy themselves a spot in a massive underground apocalypse bunker.

Whilst is handy, because the super rich have been invited to buy up a place in a five star shelter in Rothenstein, Germany, which is designed to allow them to live underground for a year and then emerge “when the worst is over”.

Just 34 “high worth” families will be welcomed into the European doomsday den, with prices only available on application.

If you can afford to, essentially, throw away that kind of money on a heavily-armored timeshare, you can afford to simply have your own built and maintain your privacy, safety, and control.

They’re nice to look at, but when the zombies are roaming the streets, the last thing I’m going to care about is if the floors are Italian marble or Brazilian zebrawood.

Article – Selling Survival

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Broker Theresa Mondale and her client stand in a clearing on the patch of mountain forest he wants to sell, making small talk about whether society is going to collapse. The topic, weighty in any context, might be anathema to other agents, whose business trades on the promise of better days. In real estate, amenities always mingle with aspiration: The house has space to grow into, the yard is big enough for a dog or the patio will entice neighbors to come by for barbecue.

But Mondale’s big, cheerful voice doesn’t waver. This is her bread and butter. She has been following the latest buzz online predicting a “global reset” in September and wants to know if the client is worried.

“If something like that were coming I would feel it, because I’m a pretty intuitive person,” says Seth Pogue, a bald man with weathered skin, strong arms and an intense manner that seems to contradict his tie-dye shirt.

The local lefty fishwrapper has an article about a local real estate seler who is quietly specializing in properties that would appeal to those of us who share our rarefied interest. I’d heard some of the commercials, and seen some of the print ads, that were put out for this gal and I recall thinking that she might be on the same page as me.

The article, which isn’t too terrible for a lefty publication, goes on to mention Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles  and his coining of the ‘redoubt’ moniker as an appelation for the region.

In my years here I’ve seen more than a few properties that had odd little quirks and features that could not be explained away as anything other than ‘survivalist’-themed. But out here, those features are not necessarily considered to be odd or strange.

If I had the money, I’d be getting myself a nice acreage out in the middle of nowhere to build my quiet little concrete home and ride out what’s left of my life in quiet and security.

Anyway…interesting article and worth the read. I’d be curious to know if her business takes off or suffers because of the spotlight being shined on her particular niche.

Article – Father buys £20,000 Cold War bunker

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A father who is so determined that his children do well in their school exams has splashed out £20,000 on a nuclear bunker in the Essex countryside so they can revise in peace.

Raymond Sturgess purchased the bunker, which is 12 feet under ground, so that his four children aged between seven and 16 are free from distractions when it comes to studying.

The Cold War relic, which only measures 13 feet by nine feet in size, was part of a former army base but is now a nature reserve in Chigwell.

A 13’x9’room ain’t a whole lotta space. Matter of fact, its about the size of your typical bedroom.

I’ve seen articles from time to time about tiny little observation bunkers coming up for sale in the UK. Usually they’re rather tiny affairs that don’t amount to much more than this one.

The more I read about military bunkers and shelters, and see what is being done by other countries, I’m becoming less a fan of the underground ones and more a fan of the partially-buried, and the above-ground varieties…especially as done by our friends the Swiss.

Bunkers of this sort don’t come up in the US very often, although I did read about some organization that did a land swap with the feds and wound up owning some awesome NSA-grade bunker facility out in the woods. The closest thing you might find to these Swiss style above-ground concrete bunkers are the old AT&T relay bunkers that dot the countryside. But, thats another post altogether…………

Link – Bunker for sale

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A superbly preserved piece of WWII history, an untouched Normandy German Gun Battery has been put for sale.

The huge gun battery and complex at Querqueville / Amfreville (Stp 277) is up for sale – as of this week.

It is well documented and its history is well known as it defended the port of Cherbourg from the hills above the city. Battery York as it was locally known, fought an artillery duel with USS Texas before being over-run after a land battle with the US army.

I would imagine the problem with buying any ‘survival bunker’ that you find on the internet is that, by virtue of being on the internet, everyone knows about it.

While the feasibility of converting such a structure into something more practical and useful may be questionable, these sorts of structures are fascinating to me. I have a book here, Fortress Europe: European Fortifications Of World War II, which is basically a guidebook to some of the more elaborate and complex bunkers scattered across Europe’s battlefields. There’s a lot of concrete under those green hills.

I don’t think I’d necessarily want to live in something like that, but I do see more and more concrete houses that are very attractive, cozy, and still offer the degree of invulnerability that makes them attractive to me.

The fact that many of these flaktowers, bunkers, submarine pens, and whatnot are still in, essentially, undamaged condition after almost 80 years is pretty good testimony to what poured concrete, rebar, and an immense budget can accomplish.

Speaking of concrete, did you know that one of Thomas Edisons less-successful ventures was selling kits and forms to build concrete houses? They even had concrete fixtures in the houses such as bathtubs. The technology has improved since then and there’s actually a local business here that does concrete-log homes….pretty neat. A log home that would be impervious to pretty much everything.

Anyway, while an old WW2 bunker would be nice to play in, I suspect it’s real merit comes from examining it and learning more about how such structures should be built and designed.

Article -10-story missile silo for sale outside of Roswell

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“It might be the safest home for sale in all of New Mexico. I say come out and look, make an offer, and you can have your underground castle right away,” said realtor Jim Moore.

40 feet underground lays an old missile silo in Roswell with a lot of history. It’s a home where you don’t have to worry about curb appeal.
All you can see from above ground is a door to the stairwell. From there, it’s straight down four stories in pitch black.
“If the lights happened to go out, you can’t see anything beyond your nose,” said Tom Edgett.
Once at the bottom, there’s a series of tunnels. Then, it finally opens up into a big room – an underground cave.

Its my understanding that these things are, in the unfinished stages, a mass of stagnant water, toxic byproducts, and endless hours of repair and restoration….but there is still something just really, really cool about them. How cool would it be to have your quaint and cozy ‘tiny house’ of 200 square feet and trapdoor in the floor leading to your zillion square foot basement?

But, yeah, unless its already been done for you, turning it into habitable space is gonna be an adventure.