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A panic room, or safe room as professionals call them,  is very much what the name suggests. The concept is simple: build or select a room within the home that is impervious to intruders that will provide safety for you and your family.

The release of the popular Jodie Foster film, Panic Room, a few years ago brought the idea of a safe room into public awareness.

But the movie didn’t invent the idea. Professionals have been building them for many years, and they’re becoming more popular all the time.

While in the past they may have been reserved for the wealthy, that’s no longer true. A safe room could be built onto the house for little more than the cost of any other room addition.

It’s not cheap, certainly, but a common undertaking of homeowners. Or, an existing room could be converted into one. In either case, the design is essentially the same.

A safe room consists of fortified walls and ceiling, with an especially hard-to-enter door. In addition, it will usually incorporate a few extras to make it habitable and for communication.

To fortify walls it’s usually necessary to go beyond the simple, but fragile, two-by-four frame and dry wall construction of ordinary home walls. They could lined with steel, but that is very costly.

A less expensive method consists of brick or cement, but load bearing ability and other construction factors have to be considered.

The ceiling will require special consideration, since brick or cement has to be much better supported. In this case, stout wood or even layers of tin might be used. Provided the ceiling has no skylight, it’s usually less of a problem, provided intruders can’t easily get up on the roof to enter from the top.

The door, of course, has to be (for all practical purposes) impenetrable. That’s readily accomplished by a double-core metal door of the sort common in office buildings. The incorporation of a stout deadbolt system completes the package.

Inside the room, a short-term water supply and maybe a toilet is helpful. A small food supply may be beneficial, if the prospect of occupying the room for more than a few hours is in view.

But, at minimum, it should be equipped with a landline phone and a cell phone. It’s important to be able to communicate with the outside world – to notify concerned loved ones and the police. A video system will come in handy, so you can see what’s happening outside the room.

Most people are unlikely to need a panic room to keep out attackers. But a safe room can serve more than one purpose.

• A well-built panic room can serve as a firesafe room in the event the house is on fire and you can’t escape.
• Or, it can be used to store large and small valuables similar to a bank vault.
• They also make good tornado and hurricane shelters.

There are, however, some cases when a readily accessible safe room might be needed for protection against home intruders.

According to FBI statistics a forcible rape occurs every five minutes somewhere in the U.S. and a significant percentage of those are in the home. Sometimes, they occur at the hands of someone you know or live with.

Costs may be lower than you suspect. You’ll only know by looking.