I did some research on the house in Mexico Beach that remained standing and suffered little to no damage from a Cat 5 Hurricane, even though it was directly on the beach and was surrounded by homes that were completely destroyed.
I was thinking, no one could be that lucky there must be a reason.
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The home not only had concrete reinforced pilings, but the pilings were much deeper than code and the house was built using a method called Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF), basically poured concrete reinforced walls surrounded by at least 2 inches of high-grade insulation and a built-in water barrier.
Here’s CNN Report on the Home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLjsDQyW5Y8
That was interesting. Thx.
The father of the one ladies in my office is a builder in the lakes region of NH. His company specializes in building these multi million lake front houses. Many of them are built with ICF forms. They also will install geothermal heating cooling systems.
One of the companies on the fore front of geothermal heating is called Warm Wood. They take 1” Fir plywood, router grooves in it for tubing to fit into. They then laminate a foil face to reflect the heat back up. This product allows underfloor heating for new construction without having to pour a concrete floor.
The houses I have seen with this product usually add an engineered wood as your finished surface and solid stone(marble) surfaces typically in the bathrooms.
Again, these tend to be higher end vacation homes.
I had to see and orthopedic surgeon down in Boston. He mentioned he had a house up in Wolfeboro, NH on the big lake (Winnipesaukee). I looked it up. His house, guest house and boat house(bigger than my house) was valued at $5.5MM. These are the type of clients that can build a dream house like the ones we are talking about.
The property taxes on his house were over $35K.
Mitt Romney used to have a house about a mile away.