Having a roof over your head during a crisis gives you a safe place to use as your base, to stop and think, to rest and recollect yourself, and to keep the elements out. There are many mental, emotional and physical benefits of finding somewhere to shelter as opposed to wandering around in the open, so finding appropriate shelter or building your own should always be high on your list of survival priorities alongside food and water.

Depending on what kind of survival situation you are facing, your survival shelter may take the form of your own home, a tent, a caravan, an abandoned building, an underground bunker, a specially designed bugout location deep in the woods, or simply a large tarp stretched between some trees.

Whatever method of survival shelter you choose, knowing that you have something in place before a SHTF situation occurs gives you a huge peace of mind. You may already have a location in mind that you intend to flee to, but having the skills to build a survival shelter wherever you find yourself is a key skill, and one that you will kick yourself for if you haven’t prepared in advance.

In the forest you should know how to utilise sticks and branches, tying them together to provide adequate cover, making large wooden dens to accommodate yourself and your family, or even something more permanent and stable. Where there is no woodland cover, then a tarp becomes an extremely useful piece of prepping kit to keep the rain and wind away from your setup, with the potential to be stretched out many different ways depending on your circumstances.

Different SHTF situations will call for different kinds of survival shelter, and at times it may be the best idea to shelter in place in your own home, but other times you may just have to grab your bug out bag and get out of there as fast as possible to your pre-determined location.

Here we’ll look at articles focusing on survival shelters whether you’ve built them yourself from scratch, or if you plan to commandeer an already existing location. We will look at the kinds of places you should be choosing to hole up in, and the many ways you can build a survival shelter with minimal effort.