Another house from throwaways

Here are two grandmothers building a house from an old trailer and papercrete on a sloping lot. I've seen trailers and modular houses on craigslist for free, so you would only have the cost of hauling it to your site. But then you would have the basic plumbing and electricity already installed. That's not a bad idea. You could live in it while you're building the outer shell. Just cover up that awful tinny trailer look. I think I would still want to do slipform stone walls and maybe build the masonry fireplace into the hill.

Building a house from throwaways.

Here's an idea for building a cheap house: Use what others are throwing away. This woman is using closed cell foam. It has to be disposed of, because of an envirmonmental law passed in the Ozarks. She is using them as load bearing supports. It looks good, but one doesn't ususally think of foam as being that strong.

Carrying this idea along, what they mostly try to give away on Craigslist is concrete chunks, mattresses and old appliances. I could see using concrete chunks like rocks in a slipform concrete wall. Maybe you could build a post and beam house filling in the sides with mattresses. Appliances, well maybe you could have a wall of microwaves. A refrigerator, washer/dryer/dishwasher wall would be quite wide, but at least they would all be more or less the same thickness. You could even have the doors open to the inside and have built in storage. It goes without saying that you would have to build this somewhere where there are no inspectors. I hear rural Vermont is like that.

Slipform stone construction

Here's an interesting narrative of a guy building a slipform house practically all by himself. This is still my favorite form of self-building although it looks like so much work. He also plans to build a masonry stove. That's what I want too.

I would like to build a large probably brick masonry stove in the center and use it also to be the central support of the roof. This is most likely against building codes, but the brick never gets warmer than you can touch, and you would keep the wood beams at least a couple of feet from the actual chimney.

This website also has an interesting article about building if you don't have much money.

Another round house in Wales

I generally don't like round houses, but this is another Welsh home that is especially cozy. And the building method I could really relate to:

"Lift logs, prop up, nail together and continue until no longer wobbly."

Straw bale was used to infill between the log posts. I wonder how hard it would be to use slipformed stone instead.

They did most of the building while living in a tent with a baby and a toddler. Now that's the real thing.

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.