“It goes up like a catalog piece of furniture, with beams from other furniture and whatever lining you can find.”
What wanderers put together to shut themselves in are improvised IKEA-style structures, made of beams taken from dismantled furniture and lined with whatever is at hand. A frame and its panels are the most common way to wall up a door or put up a partition where there isn't one.
The frame
A frame is a rectangle of beams joined with hardware, one meter wide by the height of the ceiling. Walling up a door takes one module. In an opening, the building's own jambs serve as beams.
Each module is wedged between floor and ceiling and holds up on its own. Taking one out doesn't bring down its neighbors: anyone who wants to force a way through has to dismantle the wall module by module. With a high ceiling, like the 3.8 m hypostyle, you need long beams, taken from shelving tubes, not table legs.
The gaps in the frame measure about 1 x 1.3 m. With a 2.6 m ceiling, two fit per module, and with 3.8 m, three. Each gap takes any one panel and looks like whatever was put in. You can mix panels in the same frame, and many shelters are a patchwork of cardboard, drywall and sheet metal.
The seven panels
| Panel | Strength | When struck | Trait |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cardboard | 1 | dull | only blocks the view |
| Ceiling tile | 1 | crunch | plentiful and light |
| Office divider | 2 | barely a sound | the quietest |
| Drywall | 2 | crunch and dust | can be kicked through |
| Loose planks | 3 | sharp knock | leaves gaps to look and shoot through |
| Tabletop | 4 | booms | opaque and solid |
| Sheet metal | 5 | roar | natural alarm, you hear it and so does the whole corridor |
Sheet metal protects a lot and alerts the whole corridor. The office divider protects little and makes no noise, so you choose according to who you're worried about.
Where the material comes from
The fallen ceiling tiles and the absurd furniture of the offices are the quarry: loose tiles, dividers and drywall wait in the corridors of the first levels. The metal for the long beams comes from Scrap Piles and from a dismantled metal shelving unit.
The joints, the bottleneck
Panels are plentiful, though heavy. The Fastenings are scarce. There are four, each with its own role:
- Screws: need a screwdriver, quiet and slow. You get them back when you dismantle.
- Nails: hammer or hatchet, fast and loud. They're lost when you dismantle.
- Cable ties: no tool, grip 0.6. Not suitable for the frame, and a knife cuts them.
- Tape: packing tape, grip 0.4, only for light panels.
That forces you to decide which opening gets closed properly and which gets blocked with a wardrobe. See also The Fastenings: Screws, Nails and Cable Ties.
Big material in your hands, small in the backpack
Boards, sheet metal and beams are carried with both hands. Screws, nails and cable ties go in the backpack and get used up as you add them: see Backpacks and Weight. The tool also changes what you recover when dismantling: the screwdriver gets everything out whole, while blows break the board and lose screws.
What people report
- Those who have been through there tell of low barricades, a little over a meter high, and workbenches where the dismantled material is recycled.
- People also mention tin stoves in the shelters, for heating food and boiling dirty water. Nobody has shown one.
- A minimal shelter, with a single frame of drywall and tabletop, would go up in about ten minutes. Every group gives a different figure.