The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 1573

THE HERALD 4H I SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2005 STORM-READY Home expert strengthens house hit by Charley A Punta Gorda couple have a new house built to withstand hurricane-force winds, with some help from Bob Vila and other sponsors. BY JODI MAILANDER FARRELL When Jim Minardi first heard about Hurricane Charley last year, he felt a twinge of excitement. Predictions put his Punta Gorda Isles development far from the storm's path. He toyed with the idea of taking his sailboat out to catch some waves. "I thought it would just be a real thrill ride, something out of Islands of Adventure," said Minardi, 57, a retiree who had moved with his wife, Teresa Fogolini, 43, to this canal-lined neighborhood in Southwest Florida seeking peace after Less than 24 hours later, Minardi cowered with his two black Labradors in an interior bathroom of his 1961 threebedroom, two-bath ranch house as he felt the 145-mileper-hour fury of a Category 4 hurricane.

The windows blew in and out, the roof disappeared, trusses and all, and the interior became scrambled with sea water and flying debris. "I decided to go into the bathroom after roof tiles starting coming through some of the windows, even with the boards on them. Things were just blowing through the plywood," said Minardi, whose wife was in California at the time. POSTER COUPLE Today, after watching their soggy, mold-ridden house leveled and rebuilt, Minardi and Fogolini have become the poster couple for storm-ready housing. Television home improvement expert Bob Vila, who teamed up with the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, Florida-based Mercedes Homes and several product sponsors, helped rebuild the pair's house to withstand hurricanes.

The work will be showcased in the first episode and subsequent installments of the new TV show Bob Vila (see box). As South Florida still nurses its wounds from the unexpected Category 1 destruction of Hurricane Katrina which grew in size and strength to later obliterate New Orleans Vila's show offers lessons in how to prepare your house for the next one. It would be difficult and expensive to duplicate the Punta Gorda house, a model of fortitude. Purchased for just under $150,000 in 2000, it cost $315,000 to rebuild. Under the eye of TV cameras, the new four-bedroom, two-bath house was resurrected in record time, with construction starting June 2 and ending this month.

VILA'S TIPS STORM-READY HOMES Tips from Bob Vila and the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes: Windows and doors should have storm shutters or be made of impactresistant glass. Be sure your garage door has been tested and approved to withstand hurricane winds. If not, replace or retrofit it. Double-entry doors are susceptible to high winds because they span wide spaces. The surface bolt should extend into the door header and through the threshold into the floor.

Hinges should have screws more than two inches long so they go into the structural framing of the wall. If they go only through the door frame, they may be unable to hold the door in high winds. Houses with hip roofs tend to fare better than those with gable roofs because the end walls on a gable roof take a beating from high winds. Brace the ends of gable roofs. Use custom-made sheet metal covers to keep wind-driven water A NEW STURDY HOUSE: Workers install a soffit on the Minardi home in Punta Gorda as a TV crew films.

SMART BOX IF YOU WATCH Bob Vila, a 13-week TV series on "Storm Ready Design," will air in South Florida at 6 a.m. Sundays, beginning Sept. 18 on WFOR-TV (Channel 4). Vila's website www.bobvila.com has video clips and information on the rebuilding of the Punta Gorda house destroyed in Hurricane Charley last year, as well as tips on protecting windows, key areas of susceptibility and fortifying roofs. "We are more than pleased; we are ecstatic.

I'm almost jumping out of my skin," Minardi said of his new home. "This house is absolutely beautiful and it's poured-in- concrete. Most houses POURED-IN-PLACE CONCRETE: Bob Vila chats with homeowner Jim Minardi during construction. are concrete block, but this is poured into place. We have impact-resistant glass everywhere.

It's like a bunker, but it doesn't look like one. It's just a really nice, beautiful house." Fortunately for those of us who haven't been adopted by Vila, there are tips for strengthening our homes without completely redoing out of soffits. Barrel tiles on a roof should be secured with two nails for each tile. Anchor the roof to the wall by installing hurricane straps or clips in every truss or wall-torafter connection. Tie everything together to make it harder for wind to lift your house: rafters to top plate, top plate to studs, studs to bottom plate and bottom plate to slab or footing.

REBUILDING AFTER A HURRICANE What the builders used in the rebuilt Punta Gorda home: Cast-in-place concrete walls Impact-resistant windows, front door and garage door A roof system with enhanced metal connectors secured to the house frame plywood roof decking with four nails every six inches Two nails attaching each roof tile (instead of one or none) Blocking behind soffits to resist blow-outs and water intrusion A generator for power outages Surge protection Impact-resistant screening across the lanai TRIE JUST IN TIME: Construction on the new house took just three months. them. Vila, who grew up in a concrete-block, two-bedroom bungalow in Allapattah and graduated from Miami Jackson High School, recommends that owners of older houses crawl into their attic space with a flashlight and check whether the structural wood and trusses are tied down with metal fasteners. If they aren't, he suggests hiring a professional to install the straps. Vila, a big fan of aluminum accordion shutters (he installed them on his mother's Coral Gables condo four years ago), doesn't pooh-pooh plywood for makeshift shutters.

But he warns that this inexpensive alternative still requires permanent anchors into the concrete of a house. "Don't put them up with clips," Vila said. "They have to be fastened with screws into shields." If anything, Vila's new show is a good primer on what to look for when you buy your next house. If you're not a morning person or you forget to tape or TiVo the dawnbreaking show, Vila's website www.bobvila.com has a mini-site devoted to the show, with video clips, information on the Punta Gorda house and storm-ready tips. The best advice for home buyers: Educate yourself and ask questions.

"When we bought our house, we knew it had been through Hurricane Donna and survived," said Minardi, a former college administrator. "We thought, 'It's going to be all Now we know about hip roofs versus gable roofs, structural connectors and the importance of two screws in each roof tile. Who would know to ask that kind of thing?" Vila found the Punta Gorda couple through the safe homes alliance, known as FLASH, a nonprofit organization that educates residents about fortifying their homes against disasters. FLASH had featured Minardi and Fogolini's house in a video as an example of what can happen to a house built without hurricane-resistant techniques. The Tale of Two Houses video compared the couple's home to a house across the street, which had been built in 2003 under postHurricane Andrew construction codes and had suffered little damage from Charley.

MODEL HOMES FLASH recommended that Mercedes Homes rebuild the Punta Gorda house. The Melbourne-based construction company has been working with the University of Florida and researching disaster-resistant structures for years, developing model homes that incorporate wind-resistant features, such as cast-in-place concrete construction, tiedowns, steel reinforcement, secondary roof coverings and window shutters. The Punta Gorda house has all of these features and more. There are out-swinging exterior doors that seal tighter as the wind blows harder and a soffit system engineered to prevent horizontal sheets of rain from entering the attic. The roof decking uses fiveeighths plywood in a nailing pattern that spaces four nails every six inches.

There are impact-resistant windows and doors, and even an impact-resistant screen on the lanai. "It's not that one thing makes the house better it's the combination of the whole engineering system," Minardi said. Minardi and Fogolini, who camped out in a neighbor's vacant tarp-covered house after Charley, moved into a trailer in nearby Arcadia while construction was underway. The couple is paying for the new house. Just six months before Charley struck, their insurance company deemed their house "too old" and dropped them.

They now are covered (barely) by the staterun Citizens Property Insurance Corp. To their benefit, many of the upgrades were donated by industry partners of FLASH and Vila. PGT Industries, for example, provided the impactresistant windows, Kohler Power Systems donated the generator and Simpson Strongtie supplied roof attachments. "I have a new respect for hurricanes," Minardi said. "Before Charley, I was like, 'Bring it on, give us your best Afterward, I thought, 'Oh my God, what did I ask.