Bump
You are posting some good ones tonight! Not that you don’t on other nights. ;) Love things like this.
Ping. I think you once posted a thread on alternative house design.
With interest rates going up, lowering the price of housing will be a top priority.
Oh! Oh! I have something to add to this. This is a blog by a fellow in/ around Terlingua (Texas) & he’s dome some amazing things (literally by himself, most of the time) using these containers. It’s a regular compound now, but if you read back a ways, you can see it taking shape.
http://www.thefieldlab.blogspot.com
There’s not much beyond a cellar/ underground shelter that can withstand a tornado.
Thanks, 2ndDivisionVet & all who post more links! Adding to my bookmarks.
This is the thread I was thinking about DC:
Video: Family Lives in 320-Square-Foot ‘Shotgun Shack’ (vid and story)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2729626/posts?page=56
Much more appropriate for dry climates, challenging to make work in wet or even humid ones. Not impossible, but challenging.
Rots from any moisture. Read three little pigs again.
A few people doing it in the Southwest where rainfall is low. Straw bales are stacked and covered in a cement coating like stucco. Excellent insulation and low price but I wonder how it would work in the Midwest rains.
In Maryland it requires a building permit.
Rot’s O’ Ruck getting that.
Inspectors come around, building codes get in the way.
Versatile stuff that scratch. I hear you can make biscuits from it too.
Ping...
Mother Earth News comes to the Internet
Hand crafted adobe walls with adequate thickness outlast hay bales. If the house is dug into the side of a south facing hill and provided with a coated insulated glass south facing wall, it will be warmed (and cooled) by the ground and the sun.
Mother Earth News circa 1972
Don’t let the hay get wet.
My personal preference would be for a timber framed house with straw bale in-fill. Despite all the naysayers, those houses have been built everywhere - starting in Nebraska in the 1800s. There's one in Georgia that was built in the 30s that looks neoclassical - you wouldn't know it was straw bale construction, and it's still there, despite the humid, hot, damp climate.
Water is the primary concern, so your foundation would need to be several inches above ground for the first row of bales. The eaves should extend out to maximize the protection of the walls. Having said that, the walls can handle typical wet / dry cycles.
The walls are reputed to have an insulation value of R35. Straw bales will not burn easily because of the low oxygen content within the bales. If you use concrete stucco within and without you have a serious building.
You might also consider "rammed earth" construction - there are houses in Europe that are hundreds of years old that were built this way. You mix sand, a little clay, a little water and maybe a little cement as a stabilizer, and shovel it in thin layers into a form where you pound on it with a rammer. You repeat this process until you fill the form and then you reposition the form; repeat the entire process again and do it until you reach your final wall height. You are basically making sandstone walls. Parts of the Great Wall of China were built using this process too.
I don’t know about $35,000 but I just built a 4 room, 25X25 foot concrete block house reinforced with rebar for less than $15,000.
Check out a “Cinva Ram” ... I built one for 16 x 8 x 4 engineered soil blocks ...no cement should be used only lime as it “breathes” and that is true for straw bales as well
Think about it 3600 blocks stacked English bond with 32 inches of coverage will get you a fire proof and bullet proof [well most bullets] wall 16 inches thick x 8 feet high and 100 feet long [8 x 100 = 800 sq. feet times 144 sq. inches in a square foot divided by 32 sq. inches = 3600 blocks, if you went to an 8 inch wall it would double the length to 200 feet.
