digging in a cellar /storm shelter in your exsitings home

[SPIKER]

As a youngster, teens we did my cousins place and my oldest brother's place.

Cousins place was 5' hi basement with old rubble/large rock foundation. We dug by hand and hauled out in 5 gallon bucket till we could get to stand up. This was entire basement dug deeper. then we removed one 1/3 section of foundation at a time, framed and poured by hand concrete footers and new walls in sections.

My brother's place was done as a tri-story addition, we dug mostly by hand down along foundation one full side. We dug down about 4 feet deeper than the OLD foundation, drilled that and pounded in rebar and poured new foundation & footers/floor. It was framed up about 4 to 6 feet for the footer/foundation pour. Then a short stairs was cut into old basement which was maybe 6' high. there was a 2 story addition framed up above the NEW section of lower basement. His place was on a STEEP hill so lots of fall..
there are small bobcats and small motorized bucket loaders which can crawl up/down stairs for dragging soil out or you can use a conveyor too. otherwise it is LOTS of manual labor and time...

Mark

 

[Gary Fowler]

You would want a storm shelter on the east side of your house with any door that opens to the outside facing east (all tornadoes move from west to east). Keep that in mind when building whatever you build. I added one of the factory built ones in my garage simply because I could get it installed with painted surface cheaper than I could buy the material to build it after getting the state rebate of $1000. It does take up some room but I built the garage extra large to start with but it is still too small to park all the vehicles in anyway so we just park wife's car, golf cart and RTV900 in it. The other two cars stay in my shop so the storm shelter isn't really in the way and it is closer and easier to access than an outside storm shelter would be.

 

[TnAndy]

Just pretend you are going to put on a 10X12 addition to your kitchen

Bring in the back hoe, pour whatever sub-ground foundation you want, then cap the new "addition" with PT timbers and a water proof membrane, then and cover it with soil

Rent a gas powered concrete saw and cut your opening into the new space, hang a door , add a light, put up a few shelves and call it good

8-10 thousand dollars later....Viola! ;-)

Pretty much what I did, only it was closer to maybe 1500 bucks for an 8x10....and I poured a 6" cap on top, not pressure treated timbers.

Had an excavator dig out the hole while here doing other things, then I cut a doorway into it. Hand poured a small footer, then laid 8" block on it. These were later filled with rebar and concrete.

Built a temporary deck to support the concrete:

Had concrete pumped while here doing some other concrete work:

Finished inside with white block sealer, shelves, lights, and a door I built out of red cedar with foam board core.

 

[grinder71]

Tnandy that is a nice cellar/shelter thanks for sharing the pic,s. Gary Fowler I guess I learned something I didn,t know that tornados only traveled from west to east, I could,ve swore we had a tornado a couple years ago that came straight out of the east. Thanks for all the replys.

Mark

 

[Depmandog]

You would want a storm shelter on the east side of your house with any door that opens to the outside facing east (all tornadoes move from west to east).

This isn't an entirely true statement. Tornadoes track with the thunderstorms that spawn them.

Most thunderstorms move from the southwest and, consequently, so do most tornadoes. Tornado researcher Dr. Tetsuya Fujita (1920-1998) cataloged 17,081 tornadoes whose movement was known and found that tornadoes move from all directions: from the southwest, 59 percent; from the west, 19 percent; from the northwest, 11 percent; south, 6 percent; southeast, 2 percent; and 1 percent each from the north, northeast and east.