there are so many different ways to build a house fairly inexpensively that are cost efficient and environmentally sound.
i have fallen in love with the earth ships:
No kidding Pickerell I love the earth ships. I posted some that I visited here in this group somewhere! Awesome way to live. Honestly!
yes! that's where i first heard about them...the field trip thred,. there are some great videos on alternative housing on youtube. i think the closest earthship to me is at a nature center...can't remember the name...in ohio.
strawbale is another of my personal favorites:
This post was modified from its original form on 06 Jun, 14:21
does anyone else have a favorite or two to tell us about? take a look at some of the videos on youtube. "mother earth" magazine often has an article on some house somebody made out of...you name it!
many of these houses incorporate alternative energy and water saving methods. they use safe, often natural or recycled materials.
This post was modified from its original form on 06 Jun, 14:27
I am enthralled with the earth houses outside of Taos in NM. I could get carried away but I'll find one to post. It is so amazing. The water system is a beautiful thing. They recycle water for the indoor garden that sits in the window where the solar panels are. No need for electricity. Made with tires stuffed, packed with desert sand and BEER bottles. I would love to be a part of building one. Such basic stuff. I'll find a pic. And elegant to boot!
Aw so cute! Awwwwwwwwww! I love them!
This a link but I promise I will find my photos of the exterior and interior of the ones I visited.
Check out the field trip thread so I don't have to repost LOL! Awesome photos in there. I guess they are awesome to me because I was there!
yes that's the thread...dragged it out of archives a while ago... thought crystal might want to post about heathcoate.
here are some more videos on earth ships:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=earthship+homes&aq=1s&oq=earth+ship
blue rock station has a earthship home: http://www.bluerockstation.com/earthshiphome.html
want to go there...i see they have a strawbale outhouse now...cool. i discovered their website some time ago while looking for the greenhouses made from plastic pop bottles...oh and they have llamas too!
here's a nice little house:
saw this on the news last night: http://digg.com/environment/PHOTOS_The_Greenest_Home_in_Chicago
and then there is this one...
This post was modified from its original form on 08 Jun, 10:00
these two houses are more of mainstream interest, but it indicates that green is getting to be more accepted as an "in" thing...and that is good!
here is an interesting website i just found and will add to the billboard:
By Paul Ford
Learning about off-the-grid housing in Santa Fe.
We parked and watched a man run across the frozen, snow covered field, chased by a black dog. We approached him. “Where do we go?” we asked, shivering. Through his beard he eyed us, and pointed to one of the structures.
Inside a warm, spacious room a woman took $10 for the two of us and showed us a brief, well-produced video, explaining how you simply:
- get 500 tires or so;
- dig a foundation;
- pound dirt into the tires;
- stack the tires into a houselike shape;
- plaster the tire-walls with adobe, and adobe with stucco on the exterior;
- put in a passive solar system that feeds golf-cart batteries;
- insert a 5-stage water treatment system;
- ...and unplug from the world, living in moderate comfort far from any grid on your own power, drinking filtered rainwater.
Inside, the sunlight was terrific, the entire space fairly cozy, but very hobbit-like. And with, let's be clear, fairly low resale value to anyone except a total granola-crunching lunatic like yourself, unless there's a nuclear war and living off the grid becomes handy, at which point you won't want to move anyway, but will want to insert steel bars over all the windows to avoid mutant tribes of 16-eyed irradiated flesh-eating Objectivists.
The obligatory hippie-dome, earthship style. A gnome lives there.
Water comes in from the ceiling and drips into a cistern; it is filtered for drinking, filtered for dish washing, and even sewage is turned into manure. The walls of the earthship we saw all featured embedded things - tile, bottle bottoms, anything to liven the walls and catch light. Some walls were painted with linseed oil to darken them, so that they would warm up more readily. A combination of light, heat-soaking walls, and (perhaps) plants processing waste water kept the entire place cozy on a freezing Taos day.
Tires, stacked, ready to become walls. The cans are used to limit the amount of adobe that must be used to fill in the walls; they take up space. The bottles are used to let in light.
We bought all three earthship books, $15 each instead of $20 because they had dented covers, and drove away imagining.
“I want one,” she said. “In Vermont.”
“Expensive,” I said. “A lot of hidden costs.”
“But good for the environment.”
“But I want to stay in the shower for 40 minutes today.”
“We couldn't do that,” she concurred. “But our friends might help us build it.”
“Not my friends. My friends don't want to hammer dirt into a tire for 10 hours a day. They like soothing foot baths, my friends.”
“Well, my friends.”
“It sounds like an insult. 'Go pound tires.' Can you imagine raising kids in it?”
“It would be good for kids, teach them to conserve.”
High-pitched: “Mom, why is it always cold? Why is there a colony of earthworms living in my wall? Why can't I be clean? Other families don't use rocks to wash their clothes! Why is my lipstick made of textured tofu?”
“Come on.”
“Why is my Barbie made of hemp?”
“It would be so great. In Vermont.”
“Well, I could see us taking an old house and making it earthshippy, adding passive solar and power storage, and setting up a cistern.”
“Okay, I like that too.”
“I mean, I just want a dishwasher, a nice, middle class one.”
“A dishwasher is totally unacceptable.”
I sighed. “I know. But the dishes are so clean. The sparkle. You can see all the way to the other side.”
“So scrub.”
“With gray water?”
“I want to be off the grid,” she said. “I love the idea.”
“Me too, a little,” I said. “As long as we decorate it well. I'd like to do the entire master bedroom in tires and linseed. And we can make the bed out of corn husks. Did you notice the burlap ceiling back in Taos? I hope we can afford one. Do you think I could get a bicycle made of recycled sewage?”
“The cost of burlap—”
“Prohibitive, yes, a splurge, almost decadent, but worth it. We could
here is an interesting website that will build an alternative house for you...probably not cheap though: http://www.dreamgreenhomes.com/plans/esatrium.htm
i like the second one on green rooves. chicago is doing alot with exixting structures and green rooves.
buckminster fuller way back in the 60s wanted to put part of manhatten inside a geodisic dome and planned other cities inside a dome:
Fuller proposed a 1-mile diameter crater city which would have living facilities
for 125,000 people on the outside slope & public facilities on the inside slope.
The sides of the crater would be hollow and contain rapid transit, roads, utilities, etc.This post was modified from its original form on 17 Jun, 21:51
i don't know what that music is,but it just floats along sooo peacefully...
the other one looks a little Tacky with that standard Door
and what about the rectangular windows. i agree, but still don't like them...aesthetically or sustainably...concrete and foam...no! a strawbale geodesic dome, maybe.
if i were going to do a dome, it would be geodesic ...the strength and beauty of the geometry. the one in a previous post is a bit large and i don't like their taste in furnishings so much.
would make a great greenhouse...i think i saw one somewhere.
A lot of people's ideal image of a house seems to be contained in early cartoons, where straight lines weren't required.
----
that looks like tutor architecture falling down...
you don't like that concrete bump with the rectangular door, do you? and can you really compare disney kitch to buckmisnster fuller.
i think some people are less concerned with convention, more willing to think outside the box, to come up with new or old ways of doing things that are practical, economical, sustainable and aesthetic. whatever works...in france there are people living in quite civilized cave homes...don't know how they deal with dampness and mold!
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/A-Tour-of-Frances-Cave-Homes.html?c=y&page=2
found this one for sale in az...i think they need an interior decorator with taste...they must be able to afford it!: http://thecavehouse.com/
This post was modified from its original form on 19 Jul, 10:37
do you like the australian house...i wonder why the pictures are all crooked in the nursery...
how about the recycled house?
i forgot to post this:
dfaafsfafaffff
Did you know you can just drag and drop images directly from a website?
How about a Harry Potter house:
come on...i appreciate any attempt at semi seriousness here...is this really an alternative house? is it sustainable? what is it made of? is it energy effecient?
Seriousness? Yikes! I think I'll stick to the silly thread.
now, which one IS the silly thread??? probabably the backyard fence would be a good place for a beer drinking cat. but if you find any other threads that you have an interest in, please contribute...silly is ok as long as it is also useful to some degree and related somewhat to intentional community. maybe you might decide to start an intentional community in wisconsin...how much land do you have?...well, see you in the backyard.
this is a more tradition shaped house using using earthbag construction like the eco-dome in earlier post...i like the dome better.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Homes/2005-10-01/Earthbag-Construction.aspx?page=5
This post was modified from its original form on 26 Jul, 18:20
I am looking into the whole Containerized living, either with individual units and a common patio area or built together as one larger 750-1000 sqft home. Use those dying shipping containers fro something other than sitting and rotting away, then surrounding them with adobe or soy foam and exterior mudding to protect against weather. Got lots of ideas ready to share.
lost my post...i'll try again. i'm not familiar with using this material, but on goggle there are quite a few sites. here are a few
http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/shipping-containers-housing.html
http://www.bobvila.com/HowTo_Library/Building_a_Container_House-Building_Systems-A2413.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/shipping-container-houses.php
yes, youtube has quite a few videos on this like:
This post was modified from its original form on 13 Nov, 8:37
http://www.motherearthnews.com/forums/forum.aspx?boardid=1202&g=posts&t=147974
here's a forum hat might be helpful...mother earth is a wonderful source for many things.
Yeppers, the good part is they are older shipping containers and basically lay a slab or put in a basement and set them on top and go for it.
sounds less labor intensive than earthships, strawbale, and some of the other alternative building techniques. have you seen or been in any of these structures? do windows and doors need structural reinforcement? mainly it would then need some form of insallation, flooring and the usual electrical, plumbing,heating and decorative stuff that one would have in any home?
