Homeless housing-I could do that

I've been kind of losing the dream lately. But I definitely could do this. This group makes micro houses for the homeless. It costs less than $1000, probably a lot less if you scrounged up materials (It's amazing what they throw away at construction sites.) These guys even tell you how to make a stove out of metal buckets. The pictures are not very instructive, but they have lists of materials that they use.

Keep the heat

All this heat we are experiencing this summer reminds me of something I've always wondered about. Why can't we save the summer heat for when it's cold in the winter. It seems so elementary. But apparently it's quite difficult, because it's being done in very few places.

Don Stephens calls it Annualized Geo-Solar Design and has actually designed houses where summer heat is stored under the house in an earth mass. The earth mass needs to be above the water table and insulated or kept dry some distance out from the house.

Another way to store summer heat is in saline solar ponds. Here's another explanation (scroll to the bottom of the page). And Mother Earth News had an article about it. Now this technology is mostly being used to generate electricity, but on a smaller scale it could provide heat for a house. Of course you would need some land for the pond and you would have to be next to the ocean or in a place that has a lot of salt like Utah.

How about storing hot water in insulated tanks in the basement. The water is heated by reflecting the sun down fiber optic cable. Well, this is just a theory. Maybe someone should try it.

Update: Thinking about these methods, I realized once the water was circulating, it would lose the heat in a matter of days or less, so you would have to have a separate tank or pond for each week or couple of days. I haven't seen this aspect discussed anywhere.

Missile Silo Houses

Further to my post on missile silo homes, here's a real estate agent that specializes in missile properties and also underground communication centers. The latter are more interesting to me, because the holes in the ground mostly filled with water give me the creeps. One only costs $67,000. I think they could have a few more pictures of the properties for sale on the site.

747 House

How's this for building material, a scrapped 747 jumbo jet. In case you missed this like I did in April, according to the article, a scrapped 747 costs about $100,000. The woman talked about in the article is building a multi-million dollar home with hers, but I imagine something more modest would be possible. I wonder if all the seats are still in there. You could build a great home theater room.

This article about the same house says the 747 cost $40,000. That starts to sound feasible. Just a big problem moving it to the construction site.

Wall-framing with 2x6's

Your tax dollars at work. Here is some info on cost saving building by using 2x6's instead of 2x4's. They use a lot of specialized vocabulary which I don't understand like "drywall return" and "scabbed", but if you are ready to build your house it is worth a read.

Washer-Dryers

Another I don't understand why everyone doesn't have one. A machine that washes AND dries clothes. If you have an automatic washer and an automatic dryer, why not go totally automatic and have it dry clothes too. It costs about the same as a washer and dryer together.

If you want to really save water there is the wringer washer. But then laundry is a whole-day affair. Start with the cleanest and end with the dirtiest using the same water. My mother always had a wringer washer when I was growing up. I wonder when water will become so scarce that we will be back to wringer washers. Right now I think about the only place you can buy them is at Lehman's. They have one made in Saudi Arabia. I guess even with all that oil, water is still at a premium in the desert.

Composting toilets have come a long way.

Forget about water saving toilets. I think no water or composting toilets are the best way to handle human waste. All that manure needs to get back to the earth. There are amazing systems that actually do this. The cost depends on how much work you want to put into it. At the low end is Jenkins' bucket system as described in his book Humanure (available free online). But I could see that taking out buckets of the stuff would get old fast. And it reminds of the untouchables caste, whose job was (and still is in some parts of India) to take out buckets of feces from upper caste homes.

I like the Envirolet. They have normal looking toilets that have a duct that takes the stuff down to a floor below where the composting takes place. The cost is quite high, but then if you compare it to installing a septic tank, it is reasonable. Only problem is getting the building inspector to accept your not putting a septic tank in. There are lots of composting toilets to choose from for example Sun-mar, Biolet, Phoenix, and I believe the Clivus Multrum has been around for a long time.

And then you have to have a system for handling grey water. That will be in another post.

Build a cabin for less than $4000

A good article from Mother Earth News on building a cabin with boards. The guy does a pretty good job of describing the process. There are just a few things I don't understand. Probably if I read it over and over again I would get it. The $4000 doesn't include plumbing, fixtures or electrical stuff. I guess you live by candle light or use solar electricity.

These guys say you can build a nice log home for under $10,000. I would check them out before I bought a log cabin kit.

Another housebuilding blog

Here's an interesting blog about building a house. He says he is the one-man crew for his contractor, so I guess it's a self-build.

Las Gaviotas - Colombian town of the future

This is an interesting place. An engineer dedicated his life to making a barren, unlivable environment into an oasis, both literally and figuratively. Wind and sun was used to provide energy to a village in the Colombian llanos and then they brought in Caribbean pinetrees which made the soil attractive to rain forest plants turning the area back into the rain forest it was thousands of years ago.

The most significant invention is a simple hand pump capable of tapping aquifers six times deeper than conventional models, but requiring so little effort that children can operate it. In normal pumps a heavy piston must be raised and lowered inside a pipe. Gaviotas engineers realized they could do the reverse; leave the piston stationary and lift an outer sleeve of lightweight, inexpensive PVC tubing instead.

The word llanos translates to plains, but the Colombian llanos are nothing like the fertile plains of the U.S. Midwest. Roads are barely there in the dry season and completely impassable in the rainy season. And in Colombia anytime you travel outside the cities and larger towns, you also travel back one or two centuries in time. Las Gaviotas just leaped over the petroleum fueled era.

For 6 months I lived in Villavicencio, which is where the llanos begin. It was 1975, but I knew nothing about Las Gaviotas, which was started in 1971. We lived in the second floor of a house. It had a nice, big patio where I washed clothes in the lavadero (a concrete water container with a washboard).

The strangest part of the house was the decorative brick walls. It had holes so that a breeze could come through, but also the mosquitoes could come in. We had netting for the baby's bed, but not for ours. We sprayed insecticide every night around the bedroom, a very common practice in tropical areas. Nothing worse than hearing the whine of a mosquito when you are trying to sleep. There was no hot water, the norm for tropical areas, in Colombia at least. The water came off the mountain, so it was very cold. I could not take such cold showers, and there was no tub, so it was sponge baths for me and the baby. Solar water heating would have been so simple to install. I wonder if people are using solar now.

Slipforms on steroids, ICF's (Insulated Concrete Forms)

OK, technically these are just forms not slipforms. But basically it's the same idea. You build the forms like legos, and then you fill them with concrete. ICF, insulated or insulating concrete forms. I haven't been able to find anywhere if you can fill the forms with papercrete or rocks and cement or rammed earth, which would be more the self-builder way. For sure you could not fill with cob, as it needs to breathe. I think the self-builder would want to go one row at a time, so even though the cost is comparable to a wood-frame house for a self-builder these would come out costing a lot, as you would have to buy them all at once. Unless you lived near a plant and hauled them yourself and maybe even picked up seconds.

Also all that concrete thermal mass is lost, because the insulation is on both sides of the concrete. They should make the inside panel of something that is permeable like wood not insulating material so that the concrete mass could help to store heat in the home modulating the temperature.

It seems to me the best system is Durisol, which is made from a cement-bonded wood fiber material with an insulating material inserted into the exterior side of the block. Here's a good article from Buildersnews. Lots of info here at the ICF Builders Network. Also the Green home builder has some info and links.

Round house in Wales

A little bit primitive for me--a truly low impact house, but they built it for about $7000. Interesting how they used a pond liner to make the roof waterproof. And they are growing grapes on the roof. Who knows, maybe this is the way we (you) all will be living in 50 years.

I could do this - Tinkertoys for grown ups

This Socket Systems looks very doable for a little house. I always loved playing with tinkertoys when I was a kid. This way you have room for a little loft, room you wouldn't have if you used trusses for the roof. This would be a good way to build a green house too.

How to build a shed (small house)

This is a great site about basic house building. I suppose the plans aren't up to code for building a habitable dwelling, but if that doesn't bother you they are nice simple plans. And there is a free construction how to booklet. I think it would be a good idea to build a small shed before starting a house. It's a good way to learn construction terms and basics.

Maybe I'll pleach my house

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to play house in the woods. We would make our homes out of an area surrounded by trees, the closer together the better. Sometimes we found nice green moss for carpet. One warm early spring day before the leaves came out, we found a great place with vines that made real nice walls. Too bad the vines turned out to be poison ivy.

These MIT guys got a lot of press recently for his idea of building a house from growing trees. This process of training trees to grow together with other trees is called pleaching and would be fun to experiment with, although at my age time is of the essence. Maybe it would work with bamboo; they mature in five years. Here's an interesting article about how in medieval times they built huts into pleached trees to keep them off of frequently flooded ground.

P.J. Wilkin has quite a thorough article on how to go about Growing Home complete with suggested planting plans. And then of course you could grow your own furniture while you're at it like Arborsmith Studios.

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.