Dugout Shelter Door by @cahlen on 3Speak
The door to the Dugout Shelter is finished and is helping to keep the inside warm without a heat source even when it's below freezing outside. --- ▶ Watch on 3speak.tv
Tags: #diy #homesteading #survival #prepping #minimalism #life #lifestyle
Hey everyone, Callan here, and today I'm going to be showing you the usual door frame. So these were in before, these are some 2x12s, which I used to frame the door, and also to hold these boards, which are holding back the dirt, because this shelter is basically buried six feet deep. Then, after we put the door in, we put all these things in for the door to actually close up against and get a better seal. the two by 12s to keep it from shifting as the dirt kind of settles in and puts weight on it, right? Because the door frame is going to be the thing that's most sensitive to shifting of the structure because the door will not close or will get stuck in a closed position if that happens too much. And that has happened a little bit, but I just sand the door a little bit and fix it. It's only like a 16th of an inch that it's really shifted, so I'm not... hasn't been too worrisome. Go with, these are ratchet straps, old ratchet straps that lost the other end of them, and just kind of bent, you know, you can see I doubled it up here on each of these, put a hole through them, and then drilled a hole to the other side, and did the same thing. with just a bolt. And at some point I might actually cut this, but once I do that, it'll kind of mess up the threads, and I won't be able to get this. You use one of these barrel latches, and this one, unfortunately, has broke. It was very fragile. Here's the little handle. It just went right here. I might try and fix that with J .B. Weld, but it's not really too much of a problem. And just drill the hole in the side of the... 2x12, okay, so I'm going to close it up, and it is a tight fit, but I like it as a tight fit, so I have to push on it with my foot, and that way the wind's not going to blow it, right, so I don't have to latch it every time I close it, which is nice, because it just kind of holds itself there with friction, okay? Then if I want to close it, I have to push on it, and then... it's a little bit in there. Now, I could do this, I could push on it more and get it really snug in there, but basically that's really all I need, and if I want to get it out, then I just push on the door and I can pull it with my hand. Okay, so, and for the outside, this is what the latch on the outside, when I'm inside of the house, so I actually just sod this one off so that I can take this inside with me. That's basically so that, you know, someone can't combine. lock me in here, you know what I'm saying? Okay, so then on the inside, I have put a layer of the bubble insulation, and I just stapled it to the outside. You can see the little staples here, and I left a little bit of extra so that it kind of overlaps and keeps air from coming in. and I basically did that, well, I didn't really do it on the sides, okay, so the size is very flat, but the bottom also has that overlapping here. Then you can also see I used some spray foam because there were gaps. Basically, these things, these posts had to use shims for... this board here going up against it, and there were big gaps in certain places. So I just used spray foam, which got really big, and then I just had to cut it, right? So just press, I pressed it up against the gap, sprayed it. It actually expanded out of it, and then I had to just cut what expanded out. You can see that's basically, see, here's one of the shimms I was telling you about. And here's the hinges. You can see we just put a little... gap in here, and here, I don't know if you can see, it's not exactly the way you're supposed to use these, because this thing doesn't actually settle down into the door, there's no, like, carved in little hole for it to sit in. So this is a little bit at an outward angle as it comes like this. See it better down here. See what I'm saying. But it doesn't seem to be a problem. Alright, so we're going to take a look at it from the outside. You can see the shelter is buried. Here's the stairs, which I've shown you guys. And here's the door. So I left the door the natural color because I feel like it blends in with the dirt more. And I like the idea of this shelter blending in. And also, I painted something like that basically helps to keep this from falling apart in the wind and wetness. So anyways, you can see I also put another one of those supporting boards across here on the outside to try and keep this stuff from shifting in too much under the weight of the dirt. And that's the door on the outside, where some wiring is coming in, and also it's where the wire for my outside temperature gauge comes out. So the other wires are going to a little solar panel that I have over on that side of the structure, so that's a little bit of a sneak peek. I'll be talking about that more once I get my lighting system in. And also, I didn't really talk about the material I'm using. So this is basically 3 4 inch plywood, which we just found laying around. And it works pretty good. So I did have several doors that I could choose from out here in the scrap pile, but we decide just to go with the plywood because it's easier to get it down to the shape that we want it to be. And also, as the door does shift, it's going to be easier to just sand down the edge of the door to make sure that there's not too much friction where it's brushing up against it. Plus, that leaves us some other doors for other projects. in the future. Although we did take the two, we took two hinges from one of the doors out here and used it from there, so we did use it a little bit. So anyways, that's the update on the door. I can definitely tell now that that's in there, the shelter stays pretty warm, like I've been talking about, when it gets below freezing at night down into the mid-20s. it's still in the mid-50s inside the structure, and that's without any heat source beams, some extra beams to basically support the roof, because I want to put more dirt on the roof, and I also want to plant grass on it, okay, so it's going to be more like a little hobbit hole, and also, when the snows come, if snows pile up too heavy, they can get really, really heavy, right? And that could... come through the roof, and that would be pretty much one of the worst things that could happen, okay? So, anyways, I think I'm going to put those in, and I'll make a video about it when I do that. Also, once I've done that, I'm probably going to put in a little shelf for a raised bed, which will keep me up off the ground, and also give me a place to store things underneath it, so I include lighting and recharging my USB devices, and also running my plasma machine. So anyways, that's the door and previews of things to come. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys later.