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When I built the house I just spent 7 years working on, I had a lot of days that were just plane monotonous, so I would daydream about the Next Great Project as soon as I finished the house...
If you're OCD you know exactly what I am speaking about.
Perhaps it was watching too many reruns of Stollag 17...
Maybe it was all the Underground cabins we built as kids to have a cool place to hide out in the summer.
Truthfully though I just love to build things and when I designed the house I made the bottom level only half the size of the main floor and the other half is a crawlspace about 4 foot high.
Most of my plumbing and stuff runs around the floor joists down there so I wanted enough room to have access to everything but I didn't want to build an eight foot wall, It took me 7 weeks to do the block for the garage workshop and storage room so saving 4 feet of wall seemed like a good idea.
Looking back if I really intended to do this and had the wife's permission I could have saved a lot of bother by doing this first and I wouldn't have to worry about the house falling on my if I dug out too much from below it.
I didn't leave any vents to the outside mostly cause of wanting to be energy efficient and not have a cold room under one above I was trying to heat in winter. I did talk to the building inspector about this and convinced him I could put a gable vent fan on a timer at each end one blowing in and the other blowing out to ensure a good change of air so it never mildews. I intentionally made it to push air into my workshop and draw replacement air under the house at the far end of the garage. This way in the winter when I am using the wood burner if I am working on something I can open the duct to the workshop and close the damper and the heat travels in a big circle across the garage into the crawlspace and then back into the workshop to circulate the heat so I can work on something midwinter if it is 40 out with a t-shirt on.
I got lost in a Blizzard when I was abut 20 for 23 hours and was 31 miles from where we parked when found, so I don't do cold anymore...
When I laid out the supports to the crawlspace I left a wider gap between two of the columns supporting a beam since the crawlspace is 20 foot wide and I didn't want to pay to special order 20 foot 2 by 12's and I just happened to have gotten a deal on a couple 40 foot beams delivered by accident to my house and unloaded before we discovered they loaded the wrong ones and were two thin to support the bottom garage ceiling. They sold me them to me at cost when they delivered the proper beams a few days later because it would have cost them money to rent a piece of equipment to lift them back on the truck.
I also filled the back of the bottom garage wall wide enough for a ten foot door and didn't put any rebar in that section. All the rest of the bottom level block has rebar in ever other hole and is filled to the top with concrete instead of just every 4 feet as code calls for. I will be able to saw this opening or get some of that ACME black paint they use to make tunnels and then start digging with a bobcat and dumping the dirt on the slope behind the pool so its not as steep a grade since I use a push mower for the exercise.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/senseless_/sets/72157600030895157/
Related Instructable's
http://www.instructables.com/id/One-Method-of-Removing-Soils-from-the-Top-Secret-B/
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Super-Top-Secret-Bunker-Project-Video/
If you're OCD you know exactly what I am speaking about.
Perhaps it was watching too many reruns of Stollag 17...
Maybe it was all the Underground cabins we built as kids to have a cool place to hide out in the summer.
Truthfully though I just love to build things and when I designed the house I made the bottom level only half the size of the main floor and the other half is a crawlspace about 4 foot high.
Most of my plumbing and stuff runs around the floor joists down there so I wanted enough room to have access to everything but I didn't want to build an eight foot wall, It took me 7 weeks to do the block for the garage workshop and storage room so saving 4 feet of wall seemed like a good idea.
Looking back if I really intended to do this and had the wife's permission I could have saved a lot of bother by doing this first and I wouldn't have to worry about the house falling on my if I dug out too much from below it.
I didn't leave any vents to the outside mostly cause of wanting to be energy efficient and not have a cold room under one above I was trying to heat in winter. I did talk to the building inspector about this and convinced him I could put a gable vent fan on a timer at each end one blowing in and the other blowing out to ensure a good change of air so it never mildews. I intentionally made it to push air into my workshop and draw replacement air under the house at the far end of the garage. This way in the winter when I am using the wood burner if I am working on something I can open the duct to the workshop and close the damper and the heat travels in a big circle across the garage into the crawlspace and then back into the workshop to circulate the heat so I can work on something midwinter if it is 40 out with a t-shirt on.
I got lost in a Blizzard when I was abut 20 for 23 hours and was 31 miles from where we parked when found, so I don't do cold anymore...
When I laid out the supports to the crawlspace I left a wider gap between two of the columns supporting a beam since the crawlspace is 20 foot wide and I didn't want to pay to special order 20 foot 2 by 12's and I just happened to have gotten a deal on a couple 40 foot beams delivered by accident to my house and unloaded before we discovered they loaded the wrong ones and were two thin to support the bottom garage ceiling. They sold me them to me at cost when they delivered the proper beams a few days later because it would have cost them money to rent a piece of equipment to lift them back on the truck.
I also filled the back of the bottom garage wall wide enough for a ten foot door and didn't put any rebar in that section. All the rest of the bottom level block has rebar in ever other hole and is filled to the top with concrete instead of just every 4 feet as code calls for. I will be able to saw this opening or get some of that ACME black paint they use to make tunnels and then start digging with a bobcat and dumping the dirt on the slope behind the pool so its not as steep a grade since I use a push mower for the exercise.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/senseless_/sets/72157600030895157/
Related Instructable's
http://www.instructables.com/id/One-Method-of-Removing-Soils-from-the-Top-Secret-B/
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Super-Top-Secret-Bunker-Project-Video/
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Signing UpStep 1Different Methods of Moving Soil and Reinforcing Sides
When I started thinking seriously about starting this I knew I had to do a few simple tests first that would cost me a bundle if I had to hire an Engineer and do them even before I applied for a permit.
They'd want to know the different types of soils, how thick each seam was and most importantly I wanted to know how far down the water table is.
I live in Florida and generally if you dig a hole a few feet down you'll hit water but I'm in the Panhandle of Florida so we actually have some hills here. The lot slopes to the lake enough I was able to dig a bottom level into the hill giving me a pretty safe place to hide if we get a bad hurricane. The house is extremely reinforced and all the walls are shear walls meaning at least one side has plywood glued and nailed every four inches, including a second layer on the inside of the outer walls which also went a long way to soundproofing the place. I have more anchors than required and threaded rod going from the footers to the trusses including the interior walls.
The molding work on the ceiling of the great room is actually tied into the roof trusses and the floors are all 3/4 plywood tongue and groove and glued and nailed plywood every four inches for a subfloor. It's covered by 3/4 by 2 1/4 Oak tongue and groove running perpendicular to the floor joists. The Kitchen, Halls and Bathrooms I tiled but the bulk of the house has the Oak making a very stout roof for the bottom level.
My workshop also has plywood ceilings so that part is especially strengthened to the point of a tornadoes shredded the top two floors you'd be safe huddling under the work benches.
I tend to ramble because I crushed my head three years ago in an accident so back to the intended topic of how to dig a hole under a house and not have it fall on me.
My primary method was that I felt I could safely dig along side of a footer and pour a 2 foot high concrete wall so long as I did it in stages the sides would not cave in for a few day, especially if I misted it with water from the hose. I drove rebar about a foot into the sand or clay and left the rest sticking out the top so the final bottom to top pour would bind everything together. I also after the concrete had dried and I had the forms moved down another 2 feet I would use a small spade to find the bottom of the previous rebar, and using a piece of pipe for leverage I'd bend it into the area of the new pour at a 45 and then bind it to the rebar for the next pour. The end result is a very solidly secured concrete wall 10 or 12 feet high shaped like an inverted wedge to discourage it from sinking into soft ground. Also I decided to only do 10 or 15 feet at a time but never the length of an entire wall in one shot so I didn't have the sides blowout like in a mine accident.
I spent 7 years building the house I don't want to cause it to collapse and the wife would never let me hear the end of it.
I then figured I could keep repeating the process essentially forming a very tall staircase and when I had enough head room I'd pour a final layer 8 or 10 feet high to tie it all in. Billy down at the building department would have a fit if I told him I wanted to do this and I'd need a real engineer to put their stamp of approval on it and it's not the type of job you can start and walk away from halfway done if something comes up, so this is too much for me to do as a solo project and I;m not actually Licensed Florida Contractor.
I did figure I should do a test shaft to see if it actually worked and get a record of what was down there and I would definitely need to know the water table height and the thought of having to assemble a mini drill rig in a crawlspace seemed pretty expensive but by staring long and hard at it for a time and a day, I decided I could dig a shaft by hand right next to the access port and cover the stairs with a snug piece of plywood then shovel it out the port onto the stairs then into wheel barrows and dump it out back.
How hard can that be?
I had a limited budget but I do own a mortar mixer and had a great stockpile of rebar and three inch pvc pipe left over from something I cannot recall and some lumber I'd used already for concrete forms and yes there is a Plus side to OCD especially if you have the room to store it until you need it.
I chose not to mention to the wife what I was planning mostly because she would have said no but I had just about used up all my savings finishing the house but I still had my emergency $1000 so I did some math and bargained for a lower price on 80 pound sacks of Redi-Mix if I bought 6 pallets and so I snuck a look at the wife's calendar to see her next doctors appointment and her caregiver would drive her so I set up the deliver for when she was gone and had a space cleared in the bottom garage that I could store all of this, and had some pieces of pipe on hand to walk like an Egyptian and move the 3000 pound pallets to the far back of the garage by rolling then and then using the next pallet to roll the first to the back until all six would be safely hidden inside.
The wife was running late though and they showed up just as she was leaving...
Fate Strikes Again but my wife knows I was still not quite right in the head in fact she'd say I was like that even before hitting my head and is used to me just jumping up in the morning to start working on something and I did after all build her a house and miraculously she didn't ever really ask me what the cement was for.
Once I had the cement I thought about forms and I decided if I am to do this and make a 2500 square foot bunker I need the forms to be modular so I could keep reusing them over and over.
I decided on a few basic sizes, 2' by 8',2' by 6', 2' by 4', 3' by 4', and I made them with the braces in each size identical so when I needed to make 50 of these I could drill around the perimeters in a standard pattern so I could just bolt these together, pour the concrete, then unbolt them the next day and move on. Trial and error taught me that staple gunning a smooth layer of 6 mill plastic makes for a much smoother wall than plain plywood and you just need to replace it every few pours.
With the forms made and the 6 yards of concrete safely hidden and covered with a tarp just to be safe I started digging next to the access port so I could get some standing room. The first five feet of soil is sand I believe referred to as Orange Ruffie but I'll need to check my soil survey of Walton county to be sure.
Regardless sand is pretty easy to shovel although the very top layer was had dried out pretty solidly and had some clay mixed in I had to spray it with the hose to soften it up. You actually need to keep the sand moist or the sides will cave in quickly and I made a point of misting the ground before I quit working on it for the day.
I made this approximately 7 by 7 since as I went deep it would get narrower and I was about 18 inches between two columns supporting the beams so this was a good spot to test. On the first 2 foot pour I also poured and formed a beam between the columns with a lot of heavy angle iron cut to fit tight between the columns.
The I started getting the hits from The Office of Homeland Security which I figured was just because so my of my traffic comes from Walter Reed Hospital and the rest from our troops abroad.
Then the cable company knocked on my door and said some magic piece of equipment let them locate the source as somehow coming the crawlspace under the house and they needed access under there to check for problems...
http://senseless.livejournal.com/229844.html
They'd want to know the different types of soils, how thick each seam was and most importantly I wanted to know how far down the water table is.
I live in Florida and generally if you dig a hole a few feet down you'll hit water but I'm in the Panhandle of Florida so we actually have some hills here. The lot slopes to the lake enough I was able to dig a bottom level into the hill giving me a pretty safe place to hide if we get a bad hurricane. The house is extremely reinforced and all the walls are shear walls meaning at least one side has plywood glued and nailed every four inches, including a second layer on the inside of the outer walls which also went a long way to soundproofing the place. I have more anchors than required and threaded rod going from the footers to the trusses including the interior walls.
The molding work on the ceiling of the great room is actually tied into the roof trusses and the floors are all 3/4 plywood tongue and groove and glued and nailed plywood every four inches for a subfloor. It's covered by 3/4 by 2 1/4 Oak tongue and groove running perpendicular to the floor joists. The Kitchen, Halls and Bathrooms I tiled but the bulk of the house has the Oak making a very stout roof for the bottom level.
My workshop also has plywood ceilings so that part is especially strengthened to the point of a tornadoes shredded the top two floors you'd be safe huddling under the work benches.
I tend to ramble because I crushed my head three years ago in an accident so back to the intended topic of how to dig a hole under a house and not have it fall on me.
My primary method was that I felt I could safely dig along side of a footer and pour a 2 foot high concrete wall so long as I did it in stages the sides would not cave in for a few day, especially if I misted it with water from the hose. I drove rebar about a foot into the sand or clay and left the rest sticking out the top so the final bottom to top pour would bind everything together. I also after the concrete had dried and I had the forms moved down another 2 feet I would use a small spade to find the bottom of the previous rebar, and using a piece of pipe for leverage I'd bend it into the area of the new pour at a 45 and then bind it to the rebar for the next pour. The end result is a very solidly secured concrete wall 10 or 12 feet high shaped like an inverted wedge to discourage it from sinking into soft ground. Also I decided to only do 10 or 15 feet at a time but never the length of an entire wall in one shot so I didn't have the sides blowout like in a mine accident.
I spent 7 years building the house I don't want to cause it to collapse and the wife would never let me hear the end of it.
I then figured I could keep repeating the process essentially forming a very tall staircase and when I had enough head room I'd pour a final layer 8 or 10 feet high to tie it all in. Billy down at the building department would have a fit if I told him I wanted to do this and I'd need a real engineer to put their stamp of approval on it and it's not the type of job you can start and walk away from halfway done if something comes up, so this is too much for me to do as a solo project and I;m not actually Licensed Florida Contractor.
I did figure I should do a test shaft to see if it actually worked and get a record of what was down there and I would definitely need to know the water table height and the thought of having to assemble a mini drill rig in a crawlspace seemed pretty expensive but by staring long and hard at it for a time and a day, I decided I could dig a shaft by hand right next to the access port and cover the stairs with a snug piece of plywood then shovel it out the port onto the stairs then into wheel barrows and dump it out back.
How hard can that be?
I had a limited budget but I do own a mortar mixer and had a great stockpile of rebar and three inch pvc pipe left over from something I cannot recall and some lumber I'd used already for concrete forms and yes there is a Plus side to OCD especially if you have the room to store it until you need it.
I chose not to mention to the wife what I was planning mostly because she would have said no but I had just about used up all my savings finishing the house but I still had my emergency $1000 so I did some math and bargained for a lower price on 80 pound sacks of Redi-Mix if I bought 6 pallets and so I snuck a look at the wife's calendar to see her next doctors appointment and her caregiver would drive her so I set up the deliver for when she was gone and had a space cleared in the bottom garage that I could store all of this, and had some pieces of pipe on hand to walk like an Egyptian and move the 3000 pound pallets to the far back of the garage by rolling then and then using the next pallet to roll the first to the back until all six would be safely hidden inside.
The wife was running late though and they showed up just as she was leaving...
Fate Strikes Again but my wife knows I was still not quite right in the head in fact she'd say I was like that even before hitting my head and is used to me just jumping up in the morning to start working on something and I did after all build her a house and miraculously she didn't ever really ask me what the cement was for.
Once I had the cement I thought about forms and I decided if I am to do this and make a 2500 square foot bunker I need the forms to be modular so I could keep reusing them over and over.
I decided on a few basic sizes, 2' by 8',2' by 6', 2' by 4', 3' by 4', and I made them with the braces in each size identical so when I needed to make 50 of these I could drill around the perimeters in a standard pattern so I could just bolt these together, pour the concrete, then unbolt them the next day and move on. Trial and error taught me that staple gunning a smooth layer of 6 mill plastic makes for a much smoother wall than plain plywood and you just need to replace it every few pours.
With the forms made and the 6 yards of concrete safely hidden and covered with a tarp just to be safe I started digging next to the access port so I could get some standing room. The first five feet of soil is sand I believe referred to as Orange Ruffie but I'll need to check my soil survey of Walton county to be sure.
Regardless sand is pretty easy to shovel although the very top layer was had dried out pretty solidly and had some clay mixed in I had to spray it with the hose to soften it up. You actually need to keep the sand moist or the sides will cave in quickly and I made a point of misting the ground before I quit working on it for the day.
I made this approximately 7 by 7 since as I went deep it would get narrower and I was about 18 inches between two columns supporting the beams so this was a good spot to test. On the first 2 foot pour I also poured and formed a beam between the columns with a lot of heavy angle iron cut to fit tight between the columns.
The I started getting the hits from The Office of Homeland Security which I figured was just because so my of my traffic comes from Walter Reed Hospital and the rest from our troops abroad.
Then the cable company knocked on my door and said some magic piece of equipment let them locate the source as somehow coming the crawlspace under the house and they needed access under there to check for problems...
http://senseless.livejournal.com/229844.html
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I dug straight down for 18 ft. Then dug a 12X10 ft room with an 8ft celing.
For the guy who thinks you need lead to shield from radiation. Not so!
I'm an engineer having worked on Nuclear projects.
All you need is a good filter to keep out radio active dust, "that is what nuclear fall out is" you only have to worry about Gamma radiation.
A cinder block building will protect you from Gamma if you double them up.
I would if building above ground make a wall of cinder blocks with the holes filled with
either concrete or packed earth.
Then I would build another around this wall with about 20 inches of space and then fill the space with either concrete or packed earth.
Build for strength and build the roof with a layer of 2X12 inch cinder blocks. Some earth of approximately 20 inches then another layer of 2 inch cinder blocks.
Other than life support, "mostly filtered air" you are safe from radiation with this.
I went underground due to paranoia.
My hole is under my deck which is at my dining room level.
Below my dining room is a utility room that is the same size as the slab.
Extending out from my dining room door is a deck. There is a stair way up to the deck as the back entrance to the house.
The deck then extends all the way around the house.
Under the deck just exactly under my kitchen door is where I sunk the 36X36 inch hole.
The shape of the slab is not square. One side is slightly longer than the other.
The house is sided up from the slabe and the area where I have my hole is in the corner created by the long side of the slab and the short side. It just happens to be the slab is actually 42 inches shorter at one point. That is where I dug down. That made it easy to wall my hole in under the deck maiking it look as if the slab is square.
In side my utility room I have storage shelves along the wall that is the short part of the slab. I have redesigned the shelves so one of them is actually a live storage area. We store light stuff there, "cerial, rice, dryed milk etc." That shelf is actually movable as a hidden door to the top of my shaft.
I have storage for more than a year if I had to stay there 24 hours a day.
That includes my wife, ten cats and two dogs.
I have a way to dispose of the cat littter and other nasty stuff.
I have a filtered air system, including hand pumped back up system.
I have a "geiger/muler" tube monitoring system with one in my shelter and one exteded to the surface. The one on the surface is disguised.
I have an almost endless supply of water. I also have filters for incoming water if necessary to remove sediment that may be radioactive.
If biological I have CO2 absorbers and a large supply of pure O2 and monitors to know how much O2 to add as well as the level of CO2 in case I need to manually pump the air. I also have quite a bit of clean nitrogen to replace any lost over time.
My blend is nitrogen and O2.
I'll elaborate on the "how to" on digging this without getting burried, later.
Dig baby dig!
It's coming.
Not if but when. O
bama is putting the push on to destroy this country as fast as possible with his friends.
It is the absolute gole of the Progerssive, Communsts etc.
When it comes, I'm gonna be a casuality but the cost, "if I have my way about it" will be very very high.
I'm still digging, "expanding in sq ft." Off one conrner I'm digging a long tunnerl,
75' to another area for an emergency exit.
The shaft for the exit on this will only go up to about 3 ft below the surface and will be dug with renforcement on the way up.
It will only be completed if I need to dig my way out!
Thu Mole!
The left side of your head which I crushed deals with talking and I used to obviously really ramble for the first couple years after the wreck not that I don't now...
Soon as I get free time I'll try something...
At the very least dig your hole big and totally coat it with Dry Lok on the outside not inside of the concrete but it will still come up from the floor...
As far as laws they change from state to state and even county to county but if no one can see you....
http://www.hiddenpassageway.com/
sparkie