About
Frank Schooley, Designer | Disaster Shelter

On the day of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, furniture designer Frank Schooley was saddened and moved by the destruction he saw replayed on the news.  It’s been estimated that 3 million people were affected by Haiti’s earthquake with approximately 316,000 souls perishing and 1 million Haitians left homeless. Haiti’s government also estimated 250,000 personal residences and 30,000 commercial buildings were either severely damaged or just collapsed altogether. Over three years later, sadly not much has changed. A traveler to Haiti today will find that the same disastrous construction is being rebuilt in the same dangerous way.

Being an industrious furniture maker, Frank knew he could help. Using the same techniques and materials he originally developed for his eco-friendly furniture line Terrapeg, he immediately starting drafting plans for a disaster relief shelter he calls Shelter In Day.

Learn more about Frank Schoolye's innovative disaster shelter or contact us today.

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster 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 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.