Originally Posted by MandoMan
(Post 2016016)
I understand your concern, though those who say you don’t need a safe room are right. You definitely don’t need a ready-to-use unit like those in the ad. If you have bought a lot but haven’t yet settled on the plans, you may be able to have a room “hardened” during construction for use during a hurricane or tornado, should one occur. If your house is going to be made with concrete block, choose a room with no window next to an outside block wall and have the entire room blocked in except for the door, which should have a heavy-duty steel frame bolted or pinned into the block. Unlike most of the block laid here, there should be plenty of rebar tied into the slab. (So this has to be planned for before the slab is poured.) Also, all the blocks with rebar have to be filled with concrete. A double 8” top plate would be installed at the top that is bolted into that concrete like the bolts used for attaching a stick-built wall to a slab. Doubled 2x6” lumber every 12” would be attached to the top plate with heavy-duty Simpson hurricane ties and structural screws. There’s a rim joist around these. 3/4” plywood is glued and screwed to these 2x6s using the recommended nail pattern, which I think is a long nail into the wood every 6” and 3” on the edges for this purpose. Another layer of plywood is attached to the doubled 2x6 beams from below. (This is a ceiling built under your regular truss roof and not attached to it.) The heavy steel door opens in. Chances are, if a tornado hit your house, if the rest of the house were gone, that room would remain. Drywall would be attached to the walls, and except for the heavy door and the flat, slightly lower ceiling, no one would know.
If this were in the house I live in, I would do this either to my walk in closet, which is 6x8’, or the guest bathroom, which has no window and is about 7x9’, I think. There’s a house down the street from my house that has a room like this next to the garage and laundry room, entirely inside the outside wall structure. They have air conditioning ductwork coming in at the side to keep it dry and use it as a pantry and for secure storage for valuables.
If I were trying to create a somewhat hardened room in my own house, which is twenty-three years old, I’d use my walk-in closet (I have two in my master bedroom but only use one). I would remove the drywall inside and outside the closet. Then I would epoxy bolts through the bottom plates into the slab. Then I would make a dropped ceiling of 2x8s bolted into the studs. Then I would glue and screw 3/4” plywood to the ceiling and to the walls, inside and out. I would also replace the sliding door with a heavy-duty steel door bolted into the studs. Then drywall and paint over the plywood. This might or might not withstand a Category 5 hurricane, but it would certainly be the most secure room in the house, and it could still be used as a closet.
This said, if you look at the statistics for all the hurricanes that have hit this part of Florida, all the way to Tampa, in the past sixty years, while houses like ours may sustain storm damage, fatalities occur almost entirely to people in mobile homes, vehicles, or outside. Houses that are properly secured to the foundation, with roof trusses properly attached to the top plates with hurricane ties, with roof sheathing properly nailed into the trusses as required now by the building code, and heavy-duty shingles, will probably not be harmed much by the level of storms we have had here in recorded history. If a hurricane is going over, stay in an inside room with no windows and you will almost certainly survive. Of course, you might be left without electricity for a week, or there may be trees that fall on your house, or you may need to boil your water, but that’s minor.
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