Yep, the zombies are back. And while we’re talking about the TV shamblers of “The Walking Dead” midseason premiere this Sunday, and not actual voodoo undead, it’s natural to make hypothetical plans for fortifying your home—just in case the human dead rise from their graves and wander the earth, feasting on the flesh of the living. Totally normal.
OK, it’s not all that normal, but it’s fun. But of course your spouse is freaking out when he or she sees you drawing up blueprints for a moat surrounding your house. And he or she has a good point: How much would zombie fortifications cost? And what would they do for the value of your home?
Well, let’s take a look. We’ll consider the most critical zombie-proofing improvements you can make for your home, keeping in mind that CONOP 8888, the Pentagon’s zombie-invasion plan (seriously, it made a zombie-invasion plan—don’t worry, more as a thought exercise than for fear of an actual undead uprising … we hope), estimates that any zombie outbreak wouldn’t last more than 40 days. We’re also assuming that we’re dealing with slow, dumb “classic” George Romero-type zombies, rather than fast Danny Boyle-style zombies.
Doors
The first thing you’re going to want to do to shore up your zombie defenses is to strengthen the most obvious points of entry: outside doors. At the lowest end of the scale, you can follow the lead of 99% of your zombie-movie victims and board up your doors with a series of two-by-fours, four-by-eight sheets of plywood, and long nails, essentially barricading yourself inside your home till the cavalry comes. That’ll set you back little more than the cost of a nail gun, wood, and nails ($200–$300), and it’s not a permanent addition to the house, so you won’t affect the price of the home—unless you’re really horrible at using a nail gun. The downside is that your defenses will be as strong as your carpentry, and as soon as that first zombie gets its fingers into a weak point, your entire home is compromised.
An intermediate step is a security bar or security gate on the doors, which is a permanent addition to the home that frees you up to spend your first zombie-outbreak hours on quickie weapons training and other pressing needs instead of noisily hammering a bunch of wood planks to the walls. Security bars and security gates can run anywhere from $100 to several thousand dollars before installation costs (you’ll want to get them professionally installed, so that they’re anchored securely), and they probably won’t affect the value of your home for good or ill. But, as the inimitable zombie expert Max Brookspoints out in “The Zombie Survival Guide,” “Experience has shown that as few as three walking dead can tear them down in less than twenty-four hours.”
Your best bet, and not necessarily your most expensive, is installing high-end steel doors at entry points, with steel frames and heavy-duty locks (remember to get secure bolt-style locks for the bottom of the door, too). A big plus is that steel doors generally run cheaper than wooden doors. But they tend to show more wear and need to be replaced more often, because they don’t weather the elements well (the salt air of homes near the oceans, for example, can quickly corrode steel doors). Expect the cost of an exterior steel door, with installation fees, to start at about $500 at the lowest end. But this may be the easiest zombie-proofing improvement to sell to a more practical-minded spouse: According to remodeling.hw.net, which tracks the cost of home improvements vs. their resale value, replacing an existing front door with a midrange 20-gauge steel door is worth 117% more than the money you put into it (an average cost of $1,230 vs. an average value of $1,446).
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