You can build simple and beautiful and get out now!

Lore

NPR did a little segment on Tiny Houses, LINK.
and living simply with the bare necessities. Here is the link for the homes, prebuilt or plans. LINK

Beautiful, small, low impact structures. Buy a chuck of mother earth, plop the house in place and start that garden!
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gg3

Back in 2001 I designed floorplans for a couple of micro-houses. The essential function of a house is to provide space in which to sleep, eat, wash, and poop. It should be assumed that at some point in your older years you won't be able to climb a ladder into a sleeping loft. The result was, about 160 square feet minimum on the ground.

One thing I noticed about the floorplan in the NPR link is, it apparently does not include a sink in the bathroom. Bad mistake. Washing hands after using the toilet is a must under conditions where disease risk is high and medical care is scarce. IMHO any design w/o a sink in the bathroom is disqualified from further consideration. Bathrooms need to have sufficient space that an older person using a walking aid can bathe or use the toilet by him/herself.

The present best-practice design for a refrigerator/freezer calls for more square footage than the conventional types; there may be a way to make this work by fitting it under countertops that can be raised intact when needing to access the fridge/freezer. Otherwise this will call for about twice the square footage of a conventional fridge, which is still not much of an expansion.

Also consider routine maintenance functions: For example in a bedroom, you need to have enough space to get around the bed to change your sheets. There needs to be enough space to accommodate laundry functions (about another 3 - 4 square feet) and storage of cleaning supplies (ditto). And there needs to be general storage. All of this can go into a poured basement, along with infrastructure such as a hot water tank, electrical & telecom distribution panel, and so on.

Once you start thinking in terms of sustainable minimums for all of this, expanding the floorplan to 250 square feet gets you space for a living room for socializing, and starts to look almost luxurious.

Colorado-Valley · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 16, 2004 Posts: 732

I have a friend who built a beautiful little 600 square-foot cabin with a loft and a couple of photovoltaic panels. It has a tiny bathroom. When he takes a shower, he heats a gardening can with spout on the Monarch stove, lifts it on a pulley, and then sprinkles himself.

Very charming and it only cost him $10,000, which he paid for in cash, buying local logs and some salvaged materials.

The solar panels are used to run a few energy-efficient lights and a cassette player. He only has one tape: "Hank Williams Greatest Hits."

For recreation, he happens to be a Kung Fu master and he studies Chinese medicine. He's also part of my secret local post-peak network.

Very Happy

jdumars

Our little house...

http://www.dumarsengraving.com/landsale/treehouse_nov.jpg

This summer I plan on building a PyraModule.

BastardSquad · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 24, 2004 Posts: 306

I'm hoping to build one of these babies before the end of summer-

http://www.nfdc.net/home/cbdb/Other%20Teardrops.htm

They are sooo Fu<king cool Smile

gg3

Yeah, those are cool. Though you still need a place to wash and poop. On the other hand: instant bugout housing for city-mice, with a communal campground.

Get a few acres in the woods. Build a cabin that's nothing more than a communal kitchen & eating area, bathrooms as needed (one for each six people will do), and a laundry room. You can add a living room later if/when the group can afford it. Then when disaster strikes, all the city-mice pile into their vehicles with trailers attached and head for the communal campground.

If you're planning to be there a while, you can wire the place with a few phone lines and a small PBX, and a couple of DSLs and a network, and then reel out the wires to each of the trailers so you're connected. (No, wireless is not a solution in a situation like this, please don't make me have to write two pages explaining it in detail...)

In that scenario you don't need cooking facilities in the trailer; use that space for storage so you can pack more of your stuff to bug out with.

Meanwhile back to micro-houses...

A quick look around the links shows that the current designs do indeed include sinks in the WCs so you can wash your hands after you poop.

Some of them also have enough space in the WC for stacked laundry, e.g. a front-loading washer with dryer located above. IMHO, not good to put those in the WC: the ambient moisture can't be good for the equipment, and will also facilitate mold growth in the washer (you need to leave the door open between uses to allow it to dry out). Better to make the kitchen a bit larger and the WC a bit smaller; install the washer in the kitchen and use a clotheline instead of a dryer.

Some of them have the fridge located next to the stove/oven. That's really dumb and obviously so: ambient heat from the stove and oven will be absorbed by the fridge, which then has to use more power to keep cold. Everyone knows this. And yet it's a common design flaw in all kinds of housing, including apartments, and including McMansions. You want the fridge as far away from the stove/oven as reasonably possible, for example on the opposite side of a sink & cabinets, or across the room.

If you're running on solar, consider a multi-position switch for certain items that draw a lot of watts. For example a fridge will use about 300 watts while running, as will a washer. Install a switch between the two outlets: when you're using the washer, the fridge can't come on, this limits your maximum current draw, and enables using a smaller set of PVs and batteries. Or perhaps better (if you can't remember to turn the switch back toward "fridge" when done using the washer), a mechanical (windup) timer with DPDT switch, that can be set for as long as needed (e.g. a half hour to an hour).

More later...

Wednesday

I love these little floor plans and was looking at them pretty seriously about a year ago. Since then, we have decided to stay where we are, but I would still love to have a cabin about 800-1000 sq feet, with a soapstone stove and rainwater harvesting.

There is an architect who is trying to get distribution for what he calls a H.E.L.P. House, which is primarily designed for hurricane ravaged areas. They come with gravfed water and solar panels, and the idea is to keep homeowners on their own properties to facilitate the rebuilding of the communities affected. It can be up and running in a day and provides water and power until the utilities are restored.

It would also make a good bugout cabin.

H.E.L.P. House

BastardSquad · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 24, 2004 Posts: 306

Jellric

22,000$ for a 100 sq foot house?

Is he out of his mind??

BastardSquad · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 24, 2004 Posts: 306

grabby · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Nov 08, 2005 Posts: 1328

64 studs 12 sheets plywood for roof floor and sides with 8 sheets sheetrock and 8 rolls of insulation will all make a nice 8x8 cabin.
get fold out tables and cot and you have a very nice warm cabin with 64 square feet of solar panel room on top the other side of the roof can catch rain into a rain tank.
all for less than 1000 dollars, chump change.

this could all fit in a pickup and be erected anywhere.
windows extra.

oops sorry I said the P word. I meant horse drawn buggy.

Ooh and plywood is not a post peak word either, and sheetrock!
Hmmm.better get the parts now while you can.

Oooh and Insulation!

Hey, how we gonna build these things without oil and truck transport supplying Home depot?

This is interesting!

Bricks, nails screws wire what are we going to do? panels, wirenuts wire strippers batteries, all this is not good.

wood stoves, buy one now.

I think we will be doing kevlar tents with 50 gal oil drum stoves. but what about the stove pipes?

Man, the guy who owns the junkyard is going to need a few dogs to keep the prowlers out.

Society will consist of #1 Farmers
#2 Junkyard men
#3 welders. Oil will be saved and savored for the welders.
TIG welding willl be the way, will run out of rods soonest.

Boy the more you think about it the lower you go.
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gg3

All of which illustrates why it's important to build now and build to last.

To hell with sheetrock; use plaster and lath. Or real tongue-and-groove planks for real wood panelling.

For roofs: metal sheeting, i.e. tin or copper or some such.

Do not use cedar shakes (or similar wood materials, or thatch) for roofing unless you want your house to burn down when a cinder from a fireplace (or any other nearby fire) lands on the roof.

For the exterior: stucco.

Roman concrete has lasted for 2000 years and some of the original structures are still viable. Renaissance masonry has lasted for close to 1500 years, ditto.

Yes, you can build a small exterior shell fairly cheaply, and 160 square feet or so will do nicely for a bedroom, WC with shower, and kitchen. Put it on a poured basement in which you can have a laundry & utility area and a workbench. Use the attic for storage or as a guest sleeping loft. With the right design, it becomes easy to build an "addition" later, that will give you more room when you can afford to do it.

BastardSquad · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 24, 2004 Posts: 306

loghomebuilder · Tar Sands Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 26

There is a word for these types of buildings-travel trailers or mobile homes Smile

Not really a new thing. Just a new name with a different suit of clothes.

pstarr

problem with these little houses is that virtually all municipalities won't let you build them. They want you to have a minimum-sized home (1,500 sq. ft.?) home on a minimum lot (8,000 sq.ft.?). And there are few or no jobs in the country where you could build the small home.

I wonder if this is a conspiracy by the banking, real estate, or service sectors industries to indebt people?

Take an Amtrak sleeper sometime and see what you can fit into a small space. My wife and I shared sleeper across the country. It was about 40 sq. ft, had two bunks, tiny closet and drawers, sink, and toilet (ingeniously sealed Smile

). The Japanese use something similar in the cities to sleep off binges.
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