Fortify master bedroom door?

[Netpackrat]

If going to the trouble of taking off sheetrock, adding plywood, and filling with sand, you could make a mold for reinforced concrete blocks sized to fit between the studs. Pour them in the garage, hand cart them into the house, and lay in place when the interior sheetrock is out. Seems like that would be better than sand.

[BDK]

Sand actually does a really great job absorbing impacts - think about running in it v running on hard concrete.

[Greg]

I hope you figure out how to support all the extra weight, too. Concrete, sand, armor plate in the walls of your stick built home?

Got some mission creep going on. This started by looking to slow down a potentially hostile burglar.

[skb12172]

Are you talking about loose sand in the walls or, as I assume, bags of sand ala' flood wall? If bags, I can see that being very useful and probably isn't bad for sound dampening, either.

[Netpackrat]

I can only speak to my house, but the outer walls rest directly on the poured concrete foundation. When we bought the place, I had an engineer look at something else first, and one of the things he told me is that the way the houses in my neighborhood are built, supporting a second story is even no problem, and in fact many of them have been modified to add one. He had owned one in the past, and was very familiar with the construction.

They were all built by the Corps of Engineers in the early 1950s to serve as base housing, so they were built to a much higher standard than anything else around here from that time period.

[blackeagle603]

/heads out to loading bench to measure length of shot bags/

[Aesop]

Putting loose or bagged sand, concrete, blocks, bricks, rocks, or lead shot bags into stick built walls has a technical term:
unreinforced masonry.
After an earthquake, the technical term is "rubble".
Best case, even if you had earthquake coverage, putting in non-code additions would probably void the coverage, and you'd be liable for any damage to adjoining properties.

It is the primary cause of structural failure and death in earthquakes going back to at least 4000 B.C.
So not so much in CA, AK, or anywhere else the ground shakes.

Even armor plate does better, contributing some structural strength to the wall if it's anchored well.

The bullet resistant panels are a lot lighter.


The place for heavier stuff, I think, is in large cast concrete "planters" around the outside walls, just about far enough from the actual wall to squeeze in a paint roller as needed, and 1'-3' thick by 3'-4' high, or to the bottom of window sills, as they run along.

That they give you a place to plant roses, raspberries, cactus, or kitchen herbs, with 2' or so of gravel fill at the bottom, while preventing pretty much anything smaller than an Abrams tank from crashing through the outside walls is mere coincidence. Pre-molding faux loopholes on the planters, painting them midnight black, and inserting short pieces of black pipe pointing outward such that they cure emplaced is artistic license.

[JAG2955]

I have Door Jamb Armor Link on all of my exterior doors. Buy an exterior door with a deadbolt, ensure your framing is strong enough to support it, and install the DJA and exterior door in your master bedroom. That will give you your 60 seconds in 99% of all attacks.

Let me just say that while I think it is worthwhile to harden your house and especially your sleeping quarters, current MOUT doctrine has the assault team prefer entry through a window. They're less likely to be guarded or hardened; there's more of them, so there's more choices. SWAT will likely enter through a door so they can use their kewl sledgehammers and battering rams. I have no clue what home invasion statistics currently show.

If you're concerned about bulletproofing the room, I would instead look at bulletproofing a smaller "shelter", like a bookshelf or better yet, a tall bed frame that you can hide behind. You will have cover and you can return fire through your walls. They won't know where your shelter is and won't be able to return effective fire. Do you own body armor? I'd think that's a better investment than a bulletproof panel.

Even with all my nay-saying, I'll say that discussions like these will play a role when I build my final house. Look at pictures of castle gatehouses. My future front door will be inside of a vestibule with a tight 90 degree turn to get to the main door. No room to stack or swing a ram. Murder holes in the walls and ceiling. Heavy studs where high-strength wire with 1/0 treble fish hooks can hang at tac-vest height. Portcullis, moat, and dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

[workinwifdakids]

...dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

I... I knew I liked you.

[First Shirt]

What, no sharks with lasers on their heads in the moat?