Bunker Living in Modern World HGTV

Our next residence is across the pond. Land's End is at the westernmost tip of England and is known for being either the first place you see when you enter the country or the last place you see before you leave. Land's End boasts the first and last pub, the first and last house, and if you are Elizabeth Strutton, the first and last bunker house. Built in World War II as a secret radar and communications post, it was a first line of defense against potential Nazi attacks. Now it's a four-bedroom underground home. The brightly painted entrance hall leads to a home office, a bathroom, and a bedroom currently used to store antiques. Further into the hill are a living room and an open kitchen, which doubles as a rec room complete with pool table. Just off this area are two additional bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. This comfortable home makes you almost forget about its clandestine history. The history of the bunker is still quite secretive. It was originally built in 1942 and it was used as a listening post. They would listen in to all the conversations of our pilots and the enemy pilots and they would get their positionings and then pass them on. It was a vital part of the war effort. The British Ministry of Defense decommissioned the bunker in 1982 and it sat for decades in the middle of a working farm. We bought the property off the farmer and he used it to store potatoes in. The potatoes were gone when Liz and her husband Mike took over, but the bunker still contained equipment from its military days. The bunker's bomb-proof construction posed more challenges. The bunker was very overgrown. There was ivy everywhere. It hadn't been used for a long, long time. Because of the steel reinforcements, every time they would try and fire a nail into the wall, as soon as we hit a rebar, it would just fire out again. So we were constantly being bombarded all the time with just, well, bullets really. Everything was difficult. You're starting with something that was never designed to be lived in and making it into a living space. Converting a structure with walls from two to six feet thick was no simple job. Floors had to be raised and ceilings lowered to accommodate insulation, plumbing and electricity. And all of the original room sizes had to be left as they were because the walls were impossible to move. Putting in conventional windows was obviously out of the question, but Liz needed a way to get light and ventilation into the bunker. It's very important to keep the light in, I think. Just because you're underground doesn't mean you want to feel like you're underground. The solution was tubular skylights. They provide both light and ventilation to the interior by reflecting sunlight down a polished tube and allowing air in and out through a wire mesh vent. Each of the home's six skylights took three days to drill because the bunker's roof is made from a local stone called blue alvin that is harder than concrete. The whole idea of doing this is to make sure that it's just as comfortable as living in a proper home. It's just like having windows inside. Less cleaning, though. Converting this World War II relic into a livable home was challenging, but the bunker house offers some unique benefits as far as Liz is concerned. I live in a fortress. I've got shutter doors on the outside. I can hide from zombies. I can hide from everything. I don't think this place is really supposed to be found.