When you say the word home, you associate it with safety and comfort. Therefore, when the world turns upside down you’re in danger of having that taken away from you. Under those circumstances, you must learn how to protect your home when SHTF.
You’ve learned how to bug out, now it’s time to bug in. Protecting your home will be one of the major factors of your SHTF survival, so it’s imperative that you learn how to do so.
Here are some of the ways you can protect your home when SHTF:
- Keep your protected home quiet
- Fortify your windows and walls
- Deploy CCTV surveillance around your home and external areas
- Buy self-defense weapons and equipment
- Place booby traps for unwanted intruders
- Saferoom – VERY IMPORTANT
- Hide weapons in secret locations across your home
- Use burglar alarms and sensor detectors
- Create a perimeter out of high fences and gates if possible
- Utilize locks
Keep Your Protected Home Quiet
When SHTF and people are running around like headless chickens, the first thing they’re going to do is run to you. If they know about your fortified home, that is. Loose lips sink ships. The fewer people you tell about your prepping endeavors, the better.
Your loved ones should be the only people who know about your home if it’s ready for the worst. Obviously, if you have room for people and you know them well enough to trust them, then by all means let them in. But as soon as things go south you’ll have a lot of people relying on you and more mouths to feed.
When desperation kicks in, everybody is going to be queuing at your door for your stockpiled food, water, and fortified home that will provide safety and comfort in dangerous times. The chances are, they aren’t going to be polite about you sharing it with them either.
The key is to pretend that you’re struggling as much as everyone else, and you haven’t prepared like everyone else. It’s all well and good to be proud and show everyone that before SHTF you took some initiative
Fortify Your Walls and Surrounding Areas
This next part depends on how extreme you’re willing to go in order to protect your home. Plus, this will not only benefit you if SHTF but it will also benefit you for the general protection of your home from burglars and home invaders.
Metal Window Shutters
There are many different ways to fortify your home for SHTF. Let’s start with the weakest link – windows. Consider implementing metal window shutters. Your windows can be smashed and therefore leave your home extremely vulnerable to breaking and entering.
These metal shutters will make it extremely difficult for unwanted guests to break into your humble abode.
Of course, it can be costly to get these installed, and, as we said, it all depends on what lengths you’re willing to go to fortify your home.
Similarly, you’d also have to have these installed on every window in your house for it to be worthwhile, which will add up to a pricey job.
You can’t afford to sit idly by and hope somebody won’t break into your home that’s full of stockpiled resources that are vital for survival. When desperation kicks in, the world becomes a zoo.
Plus, if you’re following all of the steps outlined below, this adds an extra layer of protection to your security portfolio.
Wall Reinforcement
In an ideal world, your house should be built with reinforced walls. This may not be the case for everyone, particularly those who live in log cabins, etc. However, in the suburbs and in most built-up areas – walls are made from concrete and are incredibly hard to penetrate.
It’s a good idea to check if your walls are solid. If they aren’t, get them re-built if possible. The most important thing is the infrastructure and materials used. It’s vital that every wall in the house is secured, to make it harder for intruders even if they do manage to find a way into your home.
For example, if one of your walls is hollow, then this makes it far easier for it to be smashed. So, if you’re in a “safe” room then it won’t be safe for long.
Deploy CCTV Surveillance
There’s no better way of monitoring your property than with CCTV.
You can monitor every room and every side of your house from your safe room and keep close tabs on your perimeter.
Remember on the purge where they had the CCTV room and you could see who was at the door?
Well, when SHTF they’re going to serve their purpose and you’ll be able to tell if it’s the pizza boy knocking or some psychopath who wants to harm you and steal your supplies.
Furthermore, it shouldn’t take a lot of convincing for you to purchase a decent CCTV system regardless. This is because it serves useful for protecting your home now from burglars and even car thieves.
You can add these to your home even outside of the purpose of SHTF, they’ll be useful both ways. You may want to consider adding them inside your home too, and these will be more useful inside for when SHTF.
You’ll be able to check your entire house from your safe room, room-to-room to see if there’s anyone inside trying to reach you. Plus, if your family is leaving the safe room, you’ll be able to monitor them and you’ll know where they are if an invader enters.
Buy Self Defense Equipment
What’s a fortress without weapons? A pile of bricks that are open for invasion. Defend yourself with self-defense weapons to prevent desperate people from harming you. When SHTF, for some people, the law goes out of the window.
Therefore, crime rates go up and this includes stealing, murdering, and all sorts of savagery. As a result of this, it’s important to prepare weaponry to use to protect yourself.
But not just that, you also have to learn how to use them properly and be prepared to actually use them, instead of hesitating when push comes to shove. You must be willing to do anything necessary to defend yourself.
Why? Because the person or people opposing you will do anything too, so you simply have to win.
Self-defense equipment can be bought now, most states offer easy access to gun shops, you can also use melee weapons too. Stock up everything you can and store it in your safe room.
Place Booby Traps For Intruders
The good thing is, nobody from the outside is going to know your home as well as you. This affords you the opportunity to prepare your home with booby traps to hinder any home invaders from stealing from or harming you.
Your booby traps can consist of painful plants, such as cactus, obstacles to trip over, holes, or missing floorboards with rugs covering them. You can also place naked nails that spike out from walls or floors and literally make your home into a minefield if you have to.
The most important thing, however, is the timing. For instance, it’s not going to be ideal to have all those traps there now while your home is in use by you and your family. So, do you do it immediately after SHTF, or leave some time for it to actually affect your local area.
This part is very important and we recommend putting everything in place immediately after SHTF.
Saferoom
Also known as a panic room, every prepper’s favorite place is the saferoom. Comes in handy before SHTF, especially when you need a breather from your other half. It’s also the perfect stronghold for your fortified home.
The key is to make it as difficult as possible to penetrate and gain access to. This can be done by creating a hidden room that is under the floor, behind a bookcase, or even through a hidden passage.
Hide Weapons Across Your Home
Another big prepper move is to scatter weapons across your home in hidden locations. When you’re head to head with an intruder empty-handed, you can run to the nearest weapon storage location in your home and ante up. Subsequently, this will save your life.
As you can see from the image above, for any DIY freaks, you can get creative with your storage ideas and make it extremely difficult for anybody to find your hidden weapon stashes.
A professional will create many different storage ideas so that if one is compromised, they won’t be able to find another stash.
You can hide them under floorboards, in stowaways, in-wall slots, air vents, inside baseboards. There is so much potential for ideas and it will make the home safer for you. It’s paramount that you only let people know that you 100% trust, so immediate family only. You should also have locations that only you know about too.
Burglar Alarms and Sensory Equipment
Get yourself a sophisticated alarm system that consists of at least motion sensors and cameras. In today’s modern era, security systems can be monitored via an app on your phone. Which is pretty convenient.
However, when SHTF, you never know how reliable an app can be, especially if your phone no longer works for whatever reason.
The good thing is, the alarm will sound and you’ll be notified even if your phone isn’t powered. Furthermore, sensory lights will come on in the middle of the night if passersby are walking into their range.
A lot of alarm systems also have a backup base station power battery that lasts 24 hours, which could be very useful.
They also come with panic buttons, glass break sensors, temperature sensors, and many more. All of which can be very useful for tracking your home after SHTF.
When monitoring your home from your safe room, all of this equipment will be supportive to your security operations and intruder prevention.
Fence Out! Very Important
Another method of keeping your house secure for SHTF is to build a perimeter of high fences. It can be useful to fortify the fences themselves to further fortify your home. For example, placing barbed wire, spikes, or even electrical fences will all go a long way to putting intruders off.
This is just one jigsaw piece of securing your home that will make an intruder pick some other house to invade, and that’s the aim of the game for you.
In every post-apocalyptic movie or video game, there’s always a fenced community to keep unwanted people (or zombies) on the outside. The same applies to your home.
Fencing, or even concrete walling the perimeter of your home is one of the cornerstones of fortifying your home for SHTF, so we place a huge emphasis on this segment of the article.
It may be wise to choose your housemates carefully and look for skilled people who can build fences such as these. Nevertheless, It would be a bit weird to set up a security fence perimeter now, so if you get somebody in who can do it after SHTF, then that would be ideal.
However, if you own private land then you can set up your fortress however you please. Furthermore, it’s even better if you live in a gated community, this will act as an extra safety barrier for you and those in your vicinity.
Unfortunately, not everybody has that luxury so you’ll have to take matters into your own hands and find a solution for security fencing to fortify your home for when SHTF.
Lock Up
One of the more obvious steps towards protecting your home when SHTF is locking up. This is simple yet people can also simply forget to lock the door and before they know it, their life is endangered.
In addition, there are extra steps you can take to make your locks stronger and more reliable. One of which is to change the quality of locks, such as a deadbolt.
A deadbolt prevents a door from being forced open including kick-ins. They come in grades 1-3, 1 being the highest level of strength and security.
Implementing this onto your home’s doors will go a long way to improving your home’s security. We also recommend against using padlocks where possible, because these are easily dissembled with bolt cutters.
Conclusion
We hope that you gained some value from this article and can now secure your home with confidence in preparation for SHTF, or even just to generally improve your home security.
Don’t forget to check out some more of our SHTF preparation articles, because you never know how close SHTF may be.