Select the most secure door and lock you can find.
Safe rooms are designed to protect inhabitants from disasters, both natural and man-made. They need strength and weight to shield them from the blasts of storms, tornadoes, or intruders and weapons of war. A safe room can't be easily lifted, rolled or torn apart. You can make your own safe room, but it isn't something to do on the spur of the moment. A safe room takes time to prepare so it is fit for the rigors of protecting you and your family. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Choose the location for your room. It needs to be big enough for the number of people living in the home. It should be on the ground floor or in the basement. If you choose a place on the ground floor, it needs to be on a cement slab, not over a crawl space or a basement. Select rooms like closets, bathrooms, storage rooms or laundry rooms that meet the above requirements unless you build a separate room inside your home. You can also build a safe room in a corner of a larger room.
2. Upgrade your security system for outside entry. Keeping intruders out of the house is a first priority. Replace all outdoor locks with strong, multiple locks and strengthen the door frames to prevent prying a door open.
3. Replace the door to your safe room with an outside door. Typical inside doors are hollow and easy to break. Outside doors are solid and harder to penetrate. Even more modern indoor doors are not as strong or secure as an outside door.
4. Reinforce the door frame. Outside doors sold with frames are sturdier than indoor door frames, but even those could stand a little extra strengthening. The frame is easier to jimmy than a lock, even a weak lock.
5. Choose a safe room without windows if at all possible. If you have no choice, insulate and strengthen the window with heavy shades and extra nails and caulking around the frame.
6. Install a HEPA filter in your home to protect the air in case of an environmental emergency. This will help save money and create a better environment at all times, but is especially important during a crisis.
7. Outfit your safe room with and emergency radio, a list of emergency channels, a NOAA weather radio, plenty of batteries, bottled water and canned food for several days.
8. Decorate your safe room with comfortable furniture. TVs, books and other items to occupy time spent in seclusion are good ideas. A safe room's primary focus is to protect you from what is going on outside, whether it is a short-term invasion or a long-term disaster, and comfort isn't a primary concern. However, once the security is in place, being comfortable while you have to be there is nice, too.
Tags: safe room, your safe, your safe room, room with, safe room with, door frames, ground floor
