June 28, 2025
Day 1,366 of the Adventure
The kids showed up today with some "mercy labor" and helped us frame up the floor for the summer kitchen over top of the storm shelter. It's a wonderful and welcome sign of progress. I had originally thought of doing this floor out of more cement. I can't even imagine how difficult that would have been. We have had personal experience with an F5 tornado back on Memorial Day weekend in 2008. Shelley's home town was struck by a massive tornado that wiped all the homes in the southern third of town right off the map. We spent the summer working there to rebuild her dad's house which was severely damaged. I noticed that of the probably 150 or more homes that were destroyed completely, most of them retained the floor over the basements. Not all, there were probably 20-30 or so that the entire floor was gone as well, exposing their basements to the ravages of the storm. The sight of that has stuck with me for all these years. In normal construction, the "sill plate" that attaches to the basement walls is usually just bolted into the concrete and everything above that is just nailed together. We decided that in addition to bolting the sill plates down, we would extend long concrete anchor bolts from deep inside the reinforced basement walls all the way up through the sill plates, past the floor joists, through the plywood floor deck and then finally through the main floor bottom wall plates. By doing this, everything up to the bottom of the main floor walls will be tightly bolted down and anchored in the reinforced basement cement walls. If that doesn't do the job, I guess we'll just have to go for one final thrill ride in the event of a large enough storm!
Adventure Quote: “What do you think? Overkill?" "I don't believe there is any such thing. But in this case, 'yes, overkill.” ― Howard Tayler
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