House plans for owner builders

Country plans has some nice simple plans for owner-builders. They have an active forum. Check out the articles, especially An Owner Built Home & Thought experiments; it's about a 60 year old guy that built his own house and how it's all in your head. Maybe I can do this when I'm 70. That leaves me 12 years to get situated.

This is the Victoria's Cottage, and I like the lofts with overlooks. I would want to have second floor decks too.

More cob houses

Further to my post on cob houses, here are a lot of recent pictures of cob houses.

Missile Silo Home

This is a little creepy to me. Like they really did build hundreds of silos with missiles in them? They seem kind of mythical unless you actually see one. Normally you couldn't get within 50 miles of these things. I saw this on HGTV, but I thought all the missile silos were out in North or South Dakota. Didn't know they were in New York.

Anyway, I suppose this is one way to take advantage of a government boondoggle. 18 million each and they only used them to store missiles for a few years.

Cave house

I could live in a cave. They look cozy. I don't need natural light in my bedroom. And I'm always reminded of "Tom Sawyer". I would want to have a secret passageway out the back that the bad guys like Injun Joe don't know about. Or keep the whole place secret like this guy.

I never realized so many people live in caves all around the world. A lot in China and in Spain and France and Turkey. Most of these are not technically caves, because they are man-made. Apparently there are many places where the rock is soft like sandstone or limestone and people have just dug into the sides of cliffs. Less common are natural caves where people just set up housekeeping or fashion a fabulous living space.

I would like to try it out sometime staying in a cave on vacation in Spain. Here you can buy one for 90,000 euros. Notice how the bedrooms are way in the back. It must be very quiet.

Solar water heater --a must

I've lived a couple places without hot water (well, one place they only turned it on Sundays), so I don't take it for granted. Never could take a cold shower, even in hot weather.

It's almost criminal to build a new house without a solar water heater. Everywhere the sun shines enough to heat water (except here in Oregon for the past month). The technology is proven and not very expensive.

There are plenty of places to read up on it, just google solar water heater. Build it Solar is a good one; they have some free pdf HomePower articles. Grab them while you can.

In the hotter climates where it doesn't freeze, solar water heating is very simple. Where you have freezing temperatures, you will either have to drain the water from the collector when temperatures approach freezing (this can be done automatically) or use a type of heat exchange system, where anti-freeze is circulated but kept separate from the household water.

Update: Another good site for Solar Water heating and other solar info.

Personal Note

For any regular visitors, sorry for the lack of posts lately. Last month my mother passed away and my daughter got a divorce. Although my mother was 91, her passing was sudden, as she had been in quite good health up until a week before her death.

I am now chief babysitter for 3 grandchildren, so I will have my hands full but hope to keep posting on a regular basis from now on.