/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.369591]

/diy/
What style of building is this? Does it even have a name?
I've looked under tipi house, tipi octagon house, octagon house, but I've only found one similar building with details about it.
I'm assuming it's octagonal, I could be wrong.

I like some of the A-frame style, but this looks cool too. So, I want to know more about this type of building and you guys seem to know building types.
Photo source doesn't say anything about it. The most info from there is that it's in Europe.

Also, cool house thread, preferably self built because /diy/.

[Anonymous No.369601]

That's an octagonal pyramid.

[Anonymous No.369603]

>>369591
Man, that castle is fucked.

[Anonymous No.369606]

>>369601
Hm. Well that seems to be the most appropriate name for it.

Would it be reasonable to think a structure like this could be partially or even fully earth-bermed?

[Anonymous No.369614]

It *may* be patterned off some obscure central or eastern European (at a guess) traditional style, or it might just as easily have been eccentrically designed by the people who built it. Also I'm no expert but it seems to me this is somewhat the opposite of the kind of structure you want for earth-berming.

[Anonymous No.369644]

>>369614
>Also I'm no expert but it seems to me this is somewhat the opposite of the kind of structure you want for earth-berming.

How so?
I'm not talking about putting the whole thing underground, just a foot or two (?*) of earth covering the outside of the structure.
*I don't recall the advised depth of earth for a proper earth-sheltered home.

[Anonymous No.369649]

>>369644
I'm thinking just the steep gradient of the walls would lead to pretty severe downhill creep, especially in wet climates. Any bermed structures I've seen before seem to have pretty shallow sloping sides/roofs

[Anonymous No.369656]

>>369649
Ah.
Couldn't that be fixed by building kajiggers that hold the earth in place?
I can't explain it, so I drew a picture in MS Paint.

Couldn't you do that to keep the earth from falling off?

[Anonymous No.369663]

>>369656

See, the problem there is the supporting frame would have to be so beefy and costly that you'd save a lot of money buy just using more traditional framing and insulation methods. Since we don't know WHY you want to make this a berm structure we can't tell you of the advantages or disadvantages of different types of construction.

On a side note, homes with non-vertical walls suck. You have a lot of dead space unless your furniture is custom made and hanging pictures on them is a pain in the ass.

[Anonymous No.369670]

>>369591
That my friend, is a hippietat.
It's a makeshift home designed by hippie that smoked a bit too much peyote.

[Anonymous No.369673]

Since it is most likely designed by a hippie, they thought of ecofriendly ways of building a house, as can be seen from the solar panel. The foundation is probably dug out to provide more heat for the house. These type of places were pretty common when I went to visit The Ecovillage Training Center down in Tennessee.

[Anonymous No.369675]

>>369663
Eh, berming is more or less for looks. I know it has thermal advantages as well, but I mostly like it because it looks neat.

There are a number of home styles I like, mostly because the design appealed to me and as I looked into it more I found more that I liked. Straw bale, earth bag, earth-sheltered, a bunch of self built methods mostly.

[Anonymous No.369689]

[Anonymous No.369693]

[Anonymous No.369759]

Bumping with a crazy house.

It's neat, but a bit too outlandish for my own tastes.

[Anonymous No.369797]

I'll admit, I am hesitant to get into self built homes stuff because of hippies.

It's not that I don't appreciate their efforts to return to older, effective housing, or to use modern techniques to build something less harmful to the planet. That's great, encourage the old/new building methods to give people better homes.
It's just the earthy-nutty-crunchy-flakey hippie crap that they drag along as well. No, I don't want to have a communal house and farm, or to rejoin my spirit with the great earth mother, or to sing in a drum circle in the middle of the night with a bunch of naked weirdos.

I just want 20 acres of land, a house set away from the roadway and neighbors, and maybe a little barn for more chickens and a couple goats.
Sustainable/eco/self built/hippie housing so far appears to be the cheapest method of going about getting that.

[Pinzfag. No.369804]

>>369797
The term you are looking for are "homesteaders" or "homesteading"

[Anonymous No.369807]

>>369804
Even some of those people are a bit outlandish and border on straight hippie.

[Pinzfag. No.369809]

>>369807
Why are you so hasty to label people.
You don't know them.
People who grow their own food/live off grid aren't "hippies"

[Anonymous No.369810]

>>369797
even just a neat house on a half/quarter acre lot is quite sufficient, especially if you put up walls

op, tell me if you like any of these things
http://calearth.org/building-designs/index.html
http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/firepit.htm
http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/projects.htm
http://www.dreamgreenhomes.com/materials/earth/earthbags.htm
You can use lime plaster over eathbags, and use rebar in the earthbags for extra strength really easily. Also, not having a dome type structure stops the risk of having a massive structural failure.
http://imgur.com/a/4QpNd
Are some examples of tadelakt, a moroccan plaster method, and some of the textures.
You could easily decorate the inside of an earthbag or just use earthbags as the walls, with steel roofing, for much less than 50k.
I just hate the hyperbolic and picturesque type "look what I found on tumblr" type of shit threads.

[Anonymous No.369814]

>>369797
http://www.earthpigments.com/products/pigments-by-color.cfm
http://darrellmorrison.com/galleries/lime-based-plaster
You can easily make your own home.
I know exposed wood weathers rather than rot when not exposed to water, but it still makes me nervous for things that one doesn't want to replace, like a trellis type thing.
Go ahead and put a few solar panels and rainwater barrels if you care to.
Do you even have the cash to do something like this?
We get a billion >muh shipping container homes
threads here with more tumblr shitbots claiming it is green to use old steel which would be better off recycled as a poorly designed housing project, in which you have to staple to of them together with welds because once insulated, they are too small.
>I mad

[Anonymous No.369817]

>>369809
I don't know all of them, but I've met quite a few. They aren't bad people, they're just not people I want to hang out with because our values are too different to be compatible.

I'm not even talking about wanting to live of the grid either. Wanting a small personal farm doesn't have to equate to being off the grid.

[Anonymous No.369820]

>>369814
>>369810
A half acre/quarter acre lot does not lend itself well to simply not having neighbors, even with a wall. Ten acre lots here have a tendency to be 100' wide, leaving your neighbors to rub elbows with you. Half acre lot and you might as well have three different neighbors peering in your windows.

I've been saving money to do this, as well as keeping tabs on vacant properties in my area. I don't want to jump in, realize I only have enough money to do half the job, and end up shit out of luck with a half built home. I certainly don't aim for 'I only spent $5,000 and two months building my perfect hobbit hole home!' I know this can cost a lot more, depending on size, method used, and property costs.
If this doesn't go through, I'll use the money saved to buy up an already existing farm property.

A lot of these things are reposted all over tumblr as #dreamhomes, but that should be expected of a site with a high starry-eyed teenage girl population.
I've already read through and bookmarked the sites you've linked a while ago when I started looking at these types of buildings. Helpful sites for future reference. I've been collecting them and other related sites to determine with method would best suit what I want in the end. I'm going to have this shit well planned out before I sign anything.

[Anonymous No.369827]

>>369820
Hmm.. a 10 acre lot that is only 100' across? So its like.. 4356 ' deep.. ? That is some bizzaro lot size configurations.

[Anonymous No.369831]

>>369820
I understand, but there's less motive to build a dream home that you can only live in on the weekends once a month, unless you live innawoods(nothing wrong with that, but unless it is relatively close to your job, kinda less pertinent).
The small things like mixing colored lime plaster and grouting/regular eathbag walls are pretty easy, whereas making an earthbag dome or doing a subterranean home get pretty pants on head retarded for the novice(perpetual water/moisture issue and the like, there are some horror stories about earthships not being done in the right manner).
You could probably throw a medium sized earthbag home up with the help of a small 10-20 person crew very easily. Once the walls are up, the roofing is pretty easy, especially with steel. Even if you have a contractor kinda direct, but you do most of the leg work, and they do the ultra major electric stuff, most are flexible with those sorts of things.
Some places have large lots in cities, others don't. Remember you'll have to pay property taxes, and they might not even let you build your home. Most Home owner's association's just want stuff not to look bad, same as city councils, but sometimes they just won't let you do anything they find out of the ordinary.
Note that you'll have to pay property tax too. If you're out of city limits, some of the counties don't have restrictive planning.
You can do some cool as hell things with plaster and colors, even just playing with light and dark sets.
The smaller Dreamgreen homes done with earthbags would be very cheap, especially with recycled windows and whatnot.

[Anonymous No.369836]

>>369827
I am curious now. (pic related

[Anonymous No.369838]

>>369836
need an airplane runway too

[Anonymous No.369845]

>>369827
Yeah, they're shit.
They often get labeled 'hunter's dream' or something to that effect. It's a retarded layout, but people buy them up.
I've heard that they're called spaghetti lots. Pic related, though not as big as some of them get, you can see where the property lines are. Some of the big stretches are along the interstate, sold as residential though I can't imagine why anyone would want to build a home in such a place.

>>369831
I know I'll have taxes and other money eaters that will come up, which is part of why I'm going to save more than what I expect to spend and then some. I'd rather have money left over than to come up short.
I know a few people who do construction stuff that can help or at least point me in the right direction, including an electrician who's built his own home and a nice pole barn.
There aren't a lot of HOA's around here, and listings for properties usually say whether one is present. Avoiding them isn't too hard,even when they aren't noted. A lot of their vacant lots are at the ends of cul-de-sacs and in areas I really don't want to be anyhow.

[Anonymous No.369849]

>>369831
On the topic of earthbags there's the auto bag filler machine.
http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/articles/bagmachine.htm
>The major benefit of the machine is that it allows workers to focus their attention on building the houses rather than filling sandbags. A crew of two guys can make 8,000 bags in an 8 hour day with our machine. This is enough bags to make 12,000 linear feet of 6" high by 10" deep wall - or a two bag thick, 10 foot high x 10 foot long wall every hour.

They only offer a purchase price for contractors, $130k-240k for the machine itself, nothing about rental. It appears the rental cost would be steep though, paying for bags, providing filler material, transporting the machine/material, and housing for the operators/build crew for the time they are on the job.
Probably better off hand filling.

Aside from that, if the house isn't bermed or underground, why not straw bale? Bale can be plastered nicely and purchased in ready to use blocks. You'll need to build a foundation so ground moisture stays out, but other than a few precautions it's not much different from building a hay fort.

[Anonymous No.370072]

>>369849
Think about what hapens if straw bale gets flooded vs earth. Think about what the structural integrity of straw bale in a hurricane, vs earthbag.
Also, worst case scenario, the earthbag gets a little sag. If the straw gets wet or rats/mice get to it, it is a lot more catastrophic than bags of dirt.

[Anonymous No.370105]

>>369591
There are sheds like this on the Garden State Parkway.

[Anonymous No.370139]

>>369591

there are few building materials/house designs that are universal. concrete maybe.

straw bale is great in the southwest (and probaby elsewhere). probably a hilarous disaster in the pacific northwest (water) or kansas (tornadoes). adobe is wonderful -- useless in new england. wood framed -- great in connecticut, expensive and termite-ridden in the southwest.

building materials and design (basements? rain issues? ...) are local decisions.

we live in a balloon construction former commercial building, with a thin concrete slab floor and a parapet roof. wouldn't last 25 years in minnesota, idaho or maine. it's 90 years old and going strong here in los angeles.

specific situation matters

[Anonymous No.370141]

>>369797

the acts of others do not affect your acts. do whatever you want. you are a separate person, remember? who cares what fools think?

[Anonymous No.370290]

>>370072
>Think about what the structural integrity of straw bale in a hurricane, vs earthbag.
I don't get hurricanes where I live. Even tornadoes are an uncommon occurrence.
Water is my potential enemy, mostly snow and rain, but from what I have been reading about straw bale, you can prevent moisture buildup with proper plastering and construction.

Build the walls on raised supports so that any ground moisture and indoor flooding issues are avoided, add water proofing to bathroom/kitchen walls and around any piping, use landscaping such as thick bushes and stone to prevent snow build up against outer walls, and have extended overhangs on the roof. Another thing commonly mentioned is to have walls that can 'breathe' so they don't trap moisture in them.

As long as you don't go full retard building it, rodents and bugs won't have any interest in the bale walls. It's not a food source like hay, once it's fully plastered it's not a nesting site, and proper bales should be tightly compacted preventing critters from moving around.
Additionally, a good plaster job on proper bales will help prevent massive fire damage, and the walls are solid, roughly 2' thick, insulating, sound proofing and act as a heat sink.

Come to think of it, I recall reading about a few straw bale homes in my area that have been around for a while.

[Anonymous No.370475]

I want to build a passive solar, earth bermed, CEB house with a sorta kinda hobbit aesthetic with some Japanese influences (like an onsen for my half Jap wife) and loft master bedroom suite.

And yeah, that's pretty much my life goal.

[Anonymous No.370483]

>>370475
I hope you've started to save up money for the endeavor. It may take you a few years to save up enough to cushion a loan to buy the land, and maybe (if the bank feels it's worthwhile) a home construction loan.
If you want to build it all out of pocket, you'll need to save even longer.


Adding to the thread theme, another method of building is cordwood construction, pic related.
Here's a site I ran across a while ago.
http://www.lowimpact.org/topics1shelter.html
Saved it to read up on things whenever the 'build sustainable' mood struck me.

[Anonymous No.370531]

>>370483
Well, it IS a major life goal, it wouldn't be very fulfilling if it were quick and easy.

[Anonymous No.370564]

>>370290
Yeah, straw! Because it's all green and shit, it's so renewable you guys! Not like that fast growth pine most homes are made of, once that's gone, it's gone!!!

[Anonymous No.370568]

>>369797
you need to calm down and smoke some weed. Then you'll see. Fuck I was browsing /pol/ for the last year becoming a fascist racist and then I started smoking weed again last week and already feel more enlightened

[Anonymous No.370573]

>>370568
Some people are less amenable than you to constantly getting opinions they don't agree with shoved down their throat. I'm in much the same boat as >>369797, I'm very interested in unique, functional (or not) architecture and living as "green" and as cheaply as feasable in a rural environment, but beyond that I hate almost everything associated with the political left and it irks me to no end when people wrap up good information with their political bullshit.

[Anonymous No.370580]

>>370573
>>Some people are less amenable than you to constantly getting opinions they don't agree with shoved down their throat.

No one in this world or the next is shoving anything down your throat, unless you have a mind made of clay, you aren't influenced by a few posts on the internet. Smoking marijuana isn't a leftist ideal either, everyone smokes weed

[Anonymous No.370584]

>>370580
>No one in this world or the next is shoving anything down your throat, unless you have a mind made of clay, you aren't influenced by a few posts on the internet.
Shockingly, I'm not referring exclusively to what I see on the internet. I've been collecting books about cabins, green building, etc. for quite some time now and almost all of them have a blatantly leftist political slant when dealing with anything beyond the technical details of how these places are built.

>Smoking marijuana isn't a leftist ideal either, everyone smokes weed
I neither said nor implied that it was. Hell, all of the founding fathers and most of the presidents of the united states smoked reefer at one point or another. I've no issues with marijuana and in fact staunchly support legalization.

[Anonymous No.370585]

>>370564
Every hear of deforestation, idiot?

[Anonymous No.370590]

>>369797
this seems semi selfish, although natural. you want to take 20 pristine acres and make it one man's. the natives will have no more hunting grounds. buy a house in a village, and bike/walk to your 20 acres.

[Anonymous No.370597]

>>370585
Ever hear of hay fields in a forest, idiot?

[Anonymous No.370611]

>>370564
Not sure if serious.
Many straw homes have regular wood frames, you still need a support structure if you make it more than one story. The 'green' part, from what I have seen, comes mostly from the drop in energy usage because the home is well insulated. Better insulation means less time running heat or cooling, which is using less electric and gas.
The other side of the 'green' part is that straw is also a major byproduct of food farming, so it's usually pretty cheap as hell and easy to find. You can get local straw instead of buying lumber that's likely trucked across the country. Less fuel used to transport it is usually regarded as better environmentally.

As for 'renewable' wheat, rice, rye, barley, and oats grow a hell of a lot faster than pines do. From what I can find, even with fast growing pines, it can be 20-30 years before you have harvest-able construction lumber. All you need for straw is a few months growing a field.
I haven't seen anyone who advocates straw homes suggest that pine will be gone forever. A lot of the focus is on local goods, insulation, and do-it-yourself building.

>>370568
>Just try it, then you'll see how right I am, man.

[Anonymous No.370615]

I just want a super efficient house that uses the least water and power possible without compromising comfort because 1) it's easy and 2) without having to pay utilities for the rest of my life I can pay off my house faster, save less for retirement, and retire earlier.
The environmental hippy shit has nothing to do with it.

[Anonymous No.370879]

>>370611
I think >>370564 was trolling, but my family is largely in logging, so I may be able to contribute a bit anyway. Pine grows fast, but does still take many years to harvest, but saplings are planted every year in a logging forrest so that lumber can be harvested yearly as well. It wouldn't make much sense for someone who's business is logging to only have a crop every 10-20 years! The US has more forrest land than it did 100 years ago largely thanks to the logging industry, since loggers always replant and expand forests they harvest (which is not just sustainably "green", it's sustainable business too!). Deforestation is a problem in the amazon and other rain-forests because it is logged more for land than lumber, and the trees there are much slower growth.

Pine forests produce more raw material by pound than equivalent acreage of food crop fields yearly, and are a major contributor to carbon fixation, or fighting global warming, since young growth trees eat more CO2 and push out more oxygen than almost any other crop (some algae and seaweeds do more, but not other farmed crops).

In other words, most american grown lumber is very green and a sustainable and beneficial crop. But what you said is also true, straw is a supplement, not a replacement, to lumber, and since it is a cheaply available byproduct of existing farming, it is also a good "green" material for construction (I would guess much better than fiberglass at least!)

Anyway, just wanted to dispel some common myths about the logging industry, if I got "Trolled", oh well...