@novacadian: Sounds like a great building plan. Very anxious to watch it coming together!
Dugout Shelter Update by @cahlen on 3Speak
I was able to acquire all the pallets needed to build the dugout shelter, and have begun digging the 5-foot hole with a tractor. Also, I'm going to attempt to build a stove out of fire bricks inste...
Tags: #diy #offgrid #survival #outdoors #minimalism #life #lifestyle #prepping #construction
Hey everyone, Callan here, and in this video, I'm going to give you an update on my winter dugout shelter build, okay? So, as you can see, we have this giant stack of pallets behind me, and all we did is yesterday we went into a town, stopped in at a farm supply store, and asked them if it had any spare pallets, and the guy took us out back, and he had, like, probably 50 pallets stacked up there. and said that we could have one of the stacks, okay? So this is the entire stack. And it worked out pretty cool because he was like, normally, I wouldn't have very many pallets, and I wouldn't have any today, except that he had screwed up some order for a truck to come and take the pallets away. And he said, so basically things worked out, you know, just in your favor. So we have basically all a large percentage of the building material that we need to build this thing. for free, okay? Then yesterday we started digging out the actual pit, and I decided to go five feet down because we have so many pallets, so I'm going to have two pallets stacked on top of each other, so I'll be able to stand in this structure. This is five feet down, two pallets will be about 80 inches tall, so it'll poke up above the ground about a foot or so, and basically, I don't know, this maybe took us half an hour to 45 minutes to dig. and it's about a fourth of what we need to do, okay, so it's going to be about two, three more of these over, and then the pallets will be stacked up against each of the walls going this way, going that way, going against the back wall, and going this way. Then on top of that, I'm going to buy some pieces of plywood and put it across the roof, and the wind will be coming from that direction, but the roof is going to be, you know, pretty low to the ground, so I don't even know if I need to pitch it. It makes it easier to build if I don't have to pitch this thing, but I might still pitch it a little bit just so as things melt, they fall back off of this hill. And this first side, we dug out into the end of the hill, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a long pipe here, which sticks out, which will come into the structure and basically give an air inlet. So that'll make sure that I have enough air when I'm, you know, burning the stove in there, and also all the walls on the ground will be dug a little bit deeper than the actual floor, and they'll be filled with gravel so that as moisture comes in, if snow melts or rain gets through the sides, then they'll basically go to those pits and flow out ultimately through this drain here. And the pallets will be, this will be the top right here, okay, so that bottom will be sitting on the ground. So basically I'm going to slide rocks in, and there's plenty of rocks. Just, you can see this hill that we've dug when digging out this hole. There are probably going to be enough rocks to fill all the walls just out of the dirt that we pull out of the ground. And these are going to hold thermal, basically hold heat. After I heat up the structure, once the fire goes out, everything will get warm, and that partially will be in these rocks. So it'll help keep the structure going even when I'm not burning anything. And also, they'll make the walls more sturdy, basically, because the roof is pretty much just going to be attached to the walls, and it will be the walls holding them down from the wind blowing the roof off. These will be the posts that sit in the corners and on the sides of the walls of the building, which will hold the pallets together, and also will service as support for the roof. So all the walls are going to be attached to each other, attached to the poles using paracord. So I just bought several hundred feet of paracord. And for the poles, I'm just going to nail a bunch of nails into them. And as they wrap around, the pallets and the poles, they'll be gripping onto those nails, so that'll help hold those poles with place. Because I'm not, I don't think I'm going to bury the poles. I need them to be as tall as they are sitting on the ground, so burying them would make them too short. So anyways, but I think if they're firmly attached to the walls and the walls have rocks in them, it's not going to go anywhere. Then for the top of the roof, like I said, it's going to be plywood, and then I just ordered a 12-by- 12 foot, basically it's a billboard vinyl. So when they put billboards up, they're using vinyl. It's a giant piece of vinyl, fairly thick, and they print an ad on it. But I'm going to get some that doesn't even have an ad on it, and it's pretty good stuff, and I'm just going to put the plywood down, and then I'm going to attach that vinyl to it, and that will waterproof it. Then for the stove, We've decided to just build it out of fire bricks, okay? So that's going to save me $100 to $150, so I won't have to buy a stove. These fire bricks are normally kind of expensive. They might be like $3 to $5 a piece, and I need quite a few of them. But luckily, what this property was used for many decades ago, for some reason resulted in fire bricks basically being strewn across the entire several acres. basically just buried a little bit underneath the ground. So pretty much if you dig anywhere, you're going to come up with these things, okay? So here's a big pile right here, which I can use. A lot of these have, you know, not the ideal situation. So you can see this, this is a really nice piece. Actually, I'll probably build with this one, but, you know, they have chips and stuff like that, and a lot of them are worse off than this one. But like I said, I'll be able to just go around the property looking for these and find all the best ones. And then I'm going to use, I think, something called refractory mortar. And that will basically fill in the holes. It's kind of like cement, but it's meant for really high heat. So it basically will fill in the holes, and I'll fill it in on the outside and on the inside of the stove. Then for the chimney. I'm going to use this pipe here, so this will be what is coming up out of the roof. It's just a long, I think it's galvanized, so you don't want to use galvanized normally because it's going to have fumes, which are going to be toxic. But they say that you can burn this off, so I'll just have to make sure that I figure out the best way to do that. And once it's all burned off, then this thing will be perfectly safe. Thinking this... Big metal piece right here will sit on top of the stove. It'll get nice and hot and it'll give me a surface to cook on. So eventually I could get a big cast iron skillet or a Dutch oven to cook my food. And then this long piece I'm going to use to line the walls in the area around the stove. And we have the ability to cut this thing to whatever dimensions we want. and then this will be part of my fuel, which would last a pretty long time. I don't think, I think this thing is going to get pretty hot in there, and I don't even think I'm going to have to use the aluminum insulation, though, so that's going to save me another $100 or so. Then I think I might use something like this, this metal here. to basically be the ground that the wood is sitting on and there will be a space underneath it for the ash to fall through. So I'll just be able to pull this out and clean out the ash. Or I might use something like this piece here. Though I think this might be a little bit small. I think I would want it to be longer than that because the wood's going to be, you know, probably at least this long. So the only thing that I'm really thinking, still thinking about, the best way to do at this point is when the chimney comes up through the plywood that has the vinyl on the top, plywood, you know, it can't get too hot, the plastic will melt if the chimney is too close to that stuff. So normally you'd use, like, chimney flashing and that kind of thing. I might have to buy a piece of flashing, but if you guys got an idea about how I can do that without spending any money, Please let me know. So, anyways, that's the update on the winter dugout shelter, and I'll keep you guys informed of the progress. See you later.
@novacadian: Sounds like a great building plan. Very anxious to watch it coming together!
@biyaawnur: Can you tell me more about what a dugout shelter is and why is it used?
@diyhub: Intresting work Cahlen. Looking forward to see how this turns out.