Hardening Your Home

Hardening Your Home
From R.F.

Most of us who consider that we may get caught by deteriorating societal circumstances in our present homes wonder how we might be able to harden that house for ballistic protection in case it is needed. Almost anything you can come up with is going to have to be prepared well ahead of time & might ruin the value of your home if the poop never seriously hits the paddle & may cost a tremendous amount of time, effort & money.  Berming your perimeter walls w/gravel, building a thick veneer of some sort of masonry ?

 

Well what about this - - unless you live in the most southern locations you will probably want to have plenty of firewood stocked.  Especially in the north you may want to invest in a LOT of firewood while it is relatively cheap & available - so why not pile it against your house to protect it ? You do NOT want it piled in the back yard to provide cover for attackers.  Don't pile it the first way you'd think of which would be perpendicular to your walls - this would be easiest, but pile it parallel and held in place by a frame of uprights driven in the ground & attached to house at top & also some horizontal members. Get the cheapest (salvaged ?) wood you can - do you have access to 'slabs' ? Lay your hardwood at least 16" thick (softwood out west thicker) by at least 5 ft. above your interior floor (go right over your windows). A military .223 or 7.62 cal. may go through a softwood 6x6, but not 16" of hardwood - make it a little thicker if you're not sure.  Cover the top of this w/a tarp strip - I like free 'lumber tarps' from the lumber yard down the road. Anyone should be grabbing as many of these excellent tarps as they can anyway.  A cord of wood will cover 16 running ft. of wall at 6 ft. high & 16" thick, so under 10 cords would protect my house.  This will admittedly look strange to your neighbors, but less so than a gravel berm laid up against your home, or concrete blocks poured full of cement ? When law & order is restored, or if it never quite fails then you pull the wood down & burn it that winter in your stove - doing no damage to your home.  Hope y'all are chipping in a few fading US dollars each year to this legendary blog ?? (SurvivalBlog. com)

 

P.S. of course I got some flack from many people in termite country (which ME isn't), but that could be dealt with easily enough.

R.F. in Western Mtns. of Maine