Shelter in a Day is made from fiberboard, but not just any fiberboard. We found an exterior grade fiberboard that is waterproof and has a borate treatment throughout that makes it termite and rot resistant. This borate treatment also makes the material more difficult to burn. Fiberboard is a man-made, recycled wood product that has fibers running in every direction which makes it strong in every direction. This absence of a single direction wood grain allows new designs and stronger joints. Wood fiber is the earths’ most basic renewable resource and fiberboard is made from pre-consumer, recycled wood chips, the waste product of lumber production. These chips are heated to break it down into individual fibers which are then pressed mixed with an acrylic binder, and baked strong sheets of various thicknesses.

I never really understood how strong fiberboard was until we ran some basic tests to try to get an idea of the strength of our new Shelter. We use a new, easy to assemble mortise and tenon joint with a locking peg to build our Shelter. We took a single tenon loop (the ‘tab’ of our Tool Free Joint) and hung it in a steel fixture so that weight could be hung from it for testing. This loop has a thickness of one inch and the amount of material around the loop was one inch, resulting in a load bearing cross section of one square inch of fiberboard. Then we added weight to the loop using six of my largest friends sitting on a wood beam and at maximum capacity of the beam, we had over 1,300 pounds of live weight on one square inch of fiberboard, without distortion or failure. It is important to keep in mind that this loading represents the worst case scenario for loading of the joint, a straight pull. In practice, the joints of the Shelter will never have loads applied in a straight line, they will load at various angles where the joint is much, much stronger. There are a 350 or so of these joints in a Shelter. The tool Free Joint and the fiberboard materials are a new technology for building construction.

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.

Our test model disaster relief house (recent picture above) has withstood Florida's elements the last 20 months beautifully. 

Mango for everybody...$20 US Mango smeared smiles..Priceless!

An Orphanage for Haiti

The Good Samaritan Orphanage is located in Grand Groave Haiti, about 45 minutes drive west of Port au Prince. The orphanage is home to about 70 kids and young adults, about 10 adult teachers, administrators, cooks and
helper/drivers, all under the direction of the Reverend Enock Deroseney, a saintly man if I ever met one. He also runs a school for most of the surrounding children with about 200 students, five days a week. The school,
dormitories, kitchen and church all fell down during the earthquake , the  epicenter was just a mile or two away, but fortunately, no lives were lost.

Since then, they have struggled to house and feed everyone. Housing consists of  wood frame cabins with blue tarp walls and tin roofs. Most have dirt floors. The tarps and other materials were donated when relief efforts flooded in but those tarps are in tatters now and replacements are scarce. Showers and laundry are all outdoors but the water is clean, coming down the mountain from a spring. Several outhouses are spaced around the camp but usage is light with only a single daily meal of rice and beans, eaten under the trees or wherever a seat can be found in camp.

Good Samaritan feeds a noon meal to the students and an evening meal to the orphans, their only meal of the day. When I visited in May, 2012, the kitchen consisted of a wood frame shack with a mud floor, mud up to the ankles of the cooks, and no running water. This kitchen was a new and welcome improvement over the previous kitchen, a charcoal brazier set up under a large mango tree. That 'kitchen' served 300 meals a day for over two years.

The site is beautiful, about a mile from the sea and about 1,000 feet up with an incredible view, but the road is long, rocky and very steep, far from the main highway and a real car killer. The orphanage owns about an acre of land but most of the camp is outside of that and the site too steep for expansion and will never have a power line in the foreseeable future.

Enock owns a larger site in Petit Groave, about 10 miles away, right on the main  highway. This site is beautiful with banana groves and mango trees and a grand church building that survived the earthquake in fine condition. Built off the side of  the church are three big classrooms and on the other side is most of a house, under construction.  The site has good water, a perfect place for a septic field, and a central courtyard just perfect for that never-ending soccer game. Electric power is on its way down the highway, less than 1/2 mile away.

We want to move the orphanage to this new site. I took basic measurements and have come up with a site plan including 10-12 cabins and a mess hall big enough so everyone can eat together. The plan also includes bathroom/shower buildings spaced between and a short distance from every cabin, and kitchen building and a bakery building so the orphanage can realize their dream to set up a for-profit baking business using machines they already have.

All the buildings are designed, secure Shelter in a Day units, 12 x16 feet, with Terrapeg furnishings and will feature concrete floors and steel roofs. The cabins will sleep six on two stacks of three bunk beds. There will be a table
with six chairs designed for the children with book/papers storage under the seats and wall lockers for clothes and personal items.

The mess hall will have tables for six and the same chairs so the space can double as classrooms.  Shower buildings will have flush toilets with a septic field on the low end of the property.

Because the Shelters are easy to build, this entire project can be built in a month and will cost about $200k a figure that is close to the average price of one US home in 1999. The plans are ready, the site is ready, the kids are ready…all we need is the money to make this happen.

Frank Schooley

Terrapeg / Shelter In A Day

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.

Our test model disaster relief house (recent picture above) has withstood Florida's elements the last 20 months beautifully. 

I finally had a chance to visit Haiti in the spring of 2012, almost 2-1/2 years after the devastating earthquake there in January of 2010.

I spent a week moving around and talking to people about housing and their lives since the quake. I came away with many impressions, most good and some not so.

Here’s what I learned:

• The Haitian people are the happiest and friendliest people I have encountered in my extensive travels
• The land is much greener than news pictures led me to believe. There is agriculture happening everywhere
• Everyone I saw or met was busy doing something useful. There is not much paid  employment available and many people are ‘funemployed’ or working at something useful but not getting paid to do it.
  
• There is new construction everywhere and they have a unique way of building. Haitians build with whatever they have and the overriding tendency is to build as much as possible with what they have.  Consequently, most construction is concrete block.

Sand and gravel is readily available and any extra money is used to buy a sack of cement. This is usually mixed on the ground and the concrete is shaped into homemade blocks. When there are enough blocks some mortar is mixed and the blocks are stacked and set. Once in awhile, a few skinny rods of steel reinforcement are added but typically, too few and too far apart. The resultant construction is adequate, unless and until another earthquake happens.  Many, if not most, of the deaths in the disaster were from these typical, under built, constructions falling.

These behaviors are ingrained in the culture deeply enough that the bad results have not changed anything. If you think about it, this is basically all they can do. If they attempt to build with say…wood for example, typically the construction takes too long because materials are imported and too expensive, and unfinished worksites are too much of a temptation for anyone who knows what to do with a 2x4 or sheet of plywood.  Many are in desperate need for life’s basics, especially shelter for their children. So it’s back to concrete and a home can take years to build if the family is poor, and most are. I was told that a home can cost 30k or more simply because of the time it takes to complete it one bag of quicklime at a time.

I lived in an orphanage for a week and experienced firsthand how they live and how they build for the climate. What’s important to Haitians is first of all security, windproof construction and good ventilation, and pretty much in that order. What’s needed in Haiti is a new way to build given the scarce resources available and the climatic realities that exist. The idea that a house can take years to build is not working well for them and traditional construction methods have proven deadly.

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.