“Single-family, wood-framed homes are one of the safest buildings around, they are very flexible,” she said. “But there are some basic things like you need to be properly bolted to your foundation. If you have a crawl space or a basement, the walls of that can’t be just 2x4s, because they will topple over like dominoes … whenever I have purchased a home, the first thing I have done is to bring a foundation specialist to come in and look at the building and tell us if there was something we can do to make it stronger. Three out of the four houses I have bought in my life, I did have things I could do and I never spent more than $1,500 on the process. And it maybe made the difference between significant damage or total loss of the building, and getting through it just fine.”