Shelter From The Storm

There's a project I've had on my to-do list that has been too long in the making.  That is to have a storm shelter under the stairway.

Since living here in Tennessee, we've had about 10 tornadoes hit in our county.  On 22 January 1999, an F3 hit the downtown area and did a lot of damage.  In 2003, I spent the night in my storm shelter as straight line winds and a small tornado caused damages.

Both of those above mentioned storms happened in the night.  I've spent many nights watching tornado 'signatures' on the weather radar pop on and off.  Nerve wracking.

So I finally decided to get my shelter fixed up.  I gave myself the deadline of today to have it done.  Why today?  It's National Disaster Day.

Here's what I started with after removing a lot of junk that was stuffed in there.  Kind of depressing...

After a lot of cleaning and painting it looks pretty good.

A carpet and bench make it much more comfortable to wait it out.

Under the bench is the fire safe (no jewels...just papers), one crate with 4 gallons of water, and the second with containers holding munchies, flashlights & batteries, candles & lighters, and cat food.

Yep, cat food.  Miss Persia has her crate with a water bowl and soft bed.  Her crate will soon be sitting in a clean cat pan with high quality scoopable litter.

The tub to the left is for iced/snowed-in storage.  Some blankets and extras you don't want to run out of.  On top of the tub is a weather alert radio that has a battery back-up.

We'll probably use the shelter 3 or 4 times a year.

But I wanted to use this closet for another sort of storm... a storm that is daily.

Ever since seeing the movie "War Room" I have really, really wanted to have my own prayer closet.

So the right side of the closet is now my prayer room.

I'm not done setting it up, but it is ready to go and today will be my first day to use it.