Survival Gear Shoppe

Survival Prepping Tips



Basic Survival Shelter Materials


Current Location: >> Home >> Survival Basics >> Survival Basics: Shelter >> Basic Survival Shelter Materials

Sheltering Materials

Not a List of Survival Materials

In truth, there is no reason to define a list of what you can build a survival shelter out of these days.

I have seen houses build out of cut logs, glass bottles with clay, and just about every piece of junk you could imagine.

It truly depends on what you have access to at the time you need to build a shelter.

The real trick is to think outside the box of what the item was originally created to do and what it could be used for.

Get inventive and give everything a possible option if it can be useful to your immediate survival.

The greatest issue that you will encounter with any resource gathering is how to fashion materials together in some fashion that can be secure under bad weather conditions or prowling animals.

Debris Shelters are survival shelters that you might expect to see either in post-wartime or urban survival situations, due to the nature of what debris often is.

However, even other debris, such as packages, luggage, or ever cargo containers have been known to wash up on the shore of a secluded beach.

During severe storms, the power of nature can quite readily wash entire cities out to sea and that stuff often ends up somewhere.

Always be careful when handling sharp, rusty, or debris that could be contaminated with feces or urine as there are a host of potential dangers such as diseases and parasites.

Home is where the heart is, but shelter is where you stay alive, keep safe, and
remain protected from the environment or danger.

Upcycling Plastics for Survival Materials

A cool trick that you can do with plastic bottles during a survival adventure is to cut the bottle into thin strips of plastic filament.

By using a sharp night, and some form of guide set to about 1-2 millimeters, you can pull the bottle across the blade to form plastic string-like ribbons.

These ribbons can then be used to tie things, or even braided into stronger "ropes" and are quite strong.

In addition the this, they react much like shrink wrap tubing in that if you heat them gently with a heat short they will shrink some or melt.

So please be careful when using sharp knives.


Looking for Larger Scrap

The larger the items you can use, the greater potential for their use might become, based on your given need.

If you need shelter, then boxes, cardboard, sheet metal, old cars, and just about anything with a decent shape or form will have potential use, as long as you can harvest or collect the materials.

Smaller items could become useful for fashioning items together, makeship clips, nails or even wire can provide multiple uses.