Would You Live In A Bunker

I built myself a bunker!!!!!!

I moved to TN and never paid a great deal of attention to tornadoes in my area. In fact I never really understood how powerful they are. The one day I was getting my hair cut in a local shop and started to ask the girl about a tornado that hit the town the year before I moved here. She really got scared and started shaking. She could not talk about at all. Which really had me scratching my head now.....

Well a couple towns over a tornado did hit and I was curious. You see it on the news all the time but you really never worry about it. After all it can not happen to me right. Well I am driving slowly thru this town that got hit and I see a family sitting on the curb. The husband is literally crying while his wife is holding him with there 2 kids cuddled up beside them. Now it got real.

I told myself I will not be that person sitting on a curb wandering if anyone would help me.

So I decided I am going to build myself a shelter. But not just any shelter because I then asked myself some questions. I asked my insurance company if I get hit will I receive the money quickly they told me it could be 3 months or more. Well I was not happy with that. So now I got thinking I need a place to LIVE while I am waiting. Now at the same time I am a computer programmer and work from home. So I also wanted a place to put my computers so they would not get damaged. If I do get hit sure there will be no power but in time it will come back on and I can still work.

Now I have NO CLUE at all what I am doing. I new figure 8 would make a strong structure is about it. I did alot reading on the internet on how am I going to build this. So I first started with a floating floor then I placed the blocks on top of it. Which would now form the walls.

This went up very quickly but the foam bricks where very expensive.

Putting the walls up went up quite quickly it was like only 3 days to get these up. I had to bring in a pump truck to get the concrete into the walls. Which this went pretty smooth. Now also keep in mind I paid CASH to get this built so it was built slowly it did not go up in a couple months. It also seem like the magic number was 5K for anything I did. Pour the concrete floor $5200.00 then pour the walls and rent that pump truck $5300.00 it was always around that amount.

As you can see in the photo below as we pump the concrete into the walls. Now with the foam on both sides I had insulation and waterproofing so by using these type of foam bricks I was killing 2 birds with one stone.

At this point now I was totally broke. I dug the hole and got the floor in and the walls and now I was broke there it sat. I just kept on working and saving for almost 2 years. There was even times it depressed me so bad I almost just filled it in a couple time with the frustration. It really bothered me every time I went into the backyard see this huge hole not finished. I was also STUCK! How will I pour concrete on the roof? Will it cave in? How much will it weight? Its actually 18 TONNES of concrete over my head as I type this. I wanted alot of videos and none of them where in english. But I made these rectangles to put the plywood on and used 4x4 every 6 inches. I had hundreds of 4x4s holding the roof up.

Well the magic day comes. I finally saved enough money to pour the roof. I figured out how to hold all that weight. I called in the professionals and had them do the roof. So now the top is prepped with hundreds of 4x4s holding it up.5.PNG

So now it begins we start to pour the concrete on the top of it. I am sitting in my lawn chair watching just thinking to myself if this breaks what a mess and a total waste of money. Down inside while we poured the concrete we heard like a bomb going off a couple times have no idea what it was. Later when the concrete was hard and I went down in there a couple 4x4s actually exploded in the center from the weight of the concrete. But it did not cave in.

Well it turned out very nice. Now you would think we have the concrete floor and 2 rooms with a center wall going across made of concrete making a figure 8 basically. Making it very strong. Now we have the 18 tonnes of concrete over head.

Now I was very excited to see it complete. I waited like a month before knocking the 4x4s out because I wanted to make sure it was good and hard. Had no problems at all everything held. I used epoxy on the floors and now wired it. Costing yet more money and electricians are not cheap. Then I had to run plumbing with a complete toilet. This has been the BIGGEST project I have ever done and I really had thought it would never get finish. All said and done it was about 50K to do start to finish which I am sure would cost alot more now being everything had gone up.

So what so you think? Would you build yourself a bunker? Some people think its the smartest thing in the world to be safe from tornadoes but others think I am crazy. I will say this when the storms come in the spring it does feel good being safe and watching the news and surfing the internet and listening to the scanner as the storms past. The odds of us getting hit are most likely 1 in a million.

Now keep in mind I am a programmer so I am sure my English is not the greatest. But like the title says would you like to have yourself a bunker? Do you think I am crazy?