Resources for Building Earth-Friendly, Low-Cost, High-Efficiency Homes
http://www.hollowtop.com/cls_html/limited.htm
By Thomas J. Elpel
We are very goal-oriented in Western culture, and we often count our successes by how much we accomplish. Eastern cultures can be very goal-oriented as well, but sometimes with a very different approach. While a westerner sits on his laurels at the end of the day and adds up what he did, an easterner might sit on his laurels and add up what he eliminated having to do.
As a simple analogy, you might say that a western artist does sculpture with clay, assembling an entire work piece by piece, while an eastern artist does sculpture in stone, eliminating everything that is not part of the final goal. It is two fundamentally different approaches to a similar point. Yet, there is still more to this analogy than that. The western sculptor may shape clay all day long, but the eastern sculptor sits in front of his stone and meditates on it. Then, at the end of the day he picks up his chisel and hammer and makes one strategic hit, revealing all at once a whole portion of the art! |
I pretty much grew up in the pages of the old Mother Earth News magazine. All through high-school I collected and read and reread every issue of Mother that I could find, accumulating a wealth of ideas and dreaming of how to someday assemble those ideas into a way of life. Over the years there were a number of articles on the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, and his "no-plowing, no-fertilizing, no-weeding, no-pesticides, do-nothing method of natural farming". His approach was essentially to research, meditate, and eliminate all the unnecessary work in growing his crops. I did not really understand Fukuoka's approach at the time, but I connected with it on an subconscious level. In many ways I was already doing a similar thing--by picking out ideas that would allow me to eliminate all the obstacles on the way to my dreams.
In Zen it has been said that, "Reverence is the elimination of all that is unnecessary." In high-school I envisioned a life in harmony and reverence with nature, and researched ways to eliminate all that was in my way of that goal.
Financing the Dream In high-school the teachers were always telling us that we had to study hard so that we could find good-paying careers as adults. I found it irritating that they would paint such a dismal picture of the future. I did not realize at the time that most of my classmates considered it normal. I had a lot of Dreams in life, and the idea of getting a job and working for the next forty years just scared the heck out of me. Thus I was highly motivated to find a no-job path to success. |
Most people rent a house, have a lot of expenses, work real hard, and maybe put 5% of their income away towards their dreams. But you have to work an awfully long time to get anywhere that way. We took the opposite approach and lived on 5% of our incomes while we put 95% away into savings. We got jobs leading stone-age wilderness expeditions, so it was pretty easy to keep expenses down. We had a sizable nest-egg by the time we married in 1989, so we bought land, pitched a tent, and started building. Living in a tent and cooking rice and beans over the campfire allowed us to continue putting virtually all of our income into our Dream. Today, with no house payment, and low energy bills, we are able to eliminate the need for jobs through much of the year.
Designing our Home Our art teacher in high-school told us that art is never finished, that you just have to pick a point to stop working on it. The same is true of architecture. You can never completely "perfect" a set of blue prints, but the more time you meditate on it, the better off you will be. The most important point to understand is that everything happens "on paper". How much a house costs, how it looks, how comfortable it is, how energy- |
Too often, however, builders simply draw a few boxes on a piece of paper, scoot them around until they are reasonably satisfied with the layout, and start building. The result is houses end up being more costly and less energy-efficient than they should be. Proper planning can make the difference between whether or not you get the house you really want.
Starting in high-school, we spent four years researching and designing our home. Even so, we were still polishing details in our plans when we started building. We simply reached a point where we had to put down the pencil and "pick up the hammer" (actually a cement mixer).
Our approach to designing was simple. We stuck to the basics. We protected the house on the north and east sides by building into the hill. We covered the south face of the house with glass, and created the greenhouse as a sort of an "airlock" between the main part of the house and the outside.
People expect a solar home to cost a lot more, but it does not have to. The main difference between a solar and non-solar home is that the solar home has most of the windows on one side. There are no more materials involved; it just takes longer to come up with a blueprint that aesthetically works inside and outside. Similarly, solar homes often have some fancy heat storage system, such as a wall of masonry, or a stack of water jugs just inches behind a wall of glass, or perhaps a gravel heat sink under the house with a system of pipes and blowers to store and retrieve the warmth. These are extras that are tacked onto a house, and there was no way we could afford such extravagance with our income-so we eliminated them as unnecessary. But we needed walls and floors, so we simply built the walls of stone, and the floors of tiled concrete, to get the advantages of thermal mass without sinking money into a specialized heat system. To eliminate the need for ducting, we put our wood stove in the middle of the house and created an open floor-plan for easy air circulation.
Everywhere in a house there are ways to eliminate complexity. For instance, when builders pour a concrete wall for an earth-bermed house they often build an insulated frame wall inside the house. This becomes the equivalent of building two walls--an extravagance we could not afford. So we used a sand-texture paint to give the concrete the appearance of a plastered-adobe wall, and put rigid insulation outside, against the wall, held in place by dirt "siding". Putting the insulation on the outside kept the thermal mass on the inside. The west side of the house was added on last, and is the only part of the main level that is truly exposed to the weather. Thus it is the only part of the house with insulation sandwiched in the wall. |
We chose the wood stove not as a matter of economics, but as part of our quality of life. I grew up around my Grandma's wood stove, and simply would not settle for anything else.) We have no backup heat when we leave, but the house temperature gradually drops to 50 degrees (F) and stays there.
Remarkably, we can cook all day on our wood stove right through the hottest parts of summer, without cooking ourselves out of the house. Creating an open loft above the kitchen area allows the heat to flow straight up, so we just let it out the upstairs door. We evacuate the heat from the greenhouse the same way. Incidentally, our water system runs through the fire box of the stove, giving us near-scalding water at the faucet, at no extra cost. On sunny days we get "automatic" hot water from our solar panel, also free. In the winter time we initially fill our hot tub with free hot water from the tap, then pay only a few dollars more per month to keep it hot with an electric element.
Our house may look expensive, but the reality is that we only have about $10 a square foot into it. Yet I have seen some million dollar homes that looked like junk. Appearance, like energy efficiency, is more a product of design than of cost. You can take the same materials and arrange them poorly or arrange them well. This is where art comes into architecture. We both had a background in art from high-school, but it does not take much artistic skill to design a good-looking house; it just takes time. Believe me, our first house plans were pretty funky, but after four years they started looking pretty good. You may not have much artistic skill to begin with, but if you picked up a pencil and sketched your cat or dog for the next four years then you would probably get pretty good at that too. We developed a sense of architecture by just doing it, and now we are much faster at it. Most importantly, however, the investment of time allowed us to meditate on our plans, so we could eliminate extra work and materials and save many thousands of dollars.
The Building Process Our house was well researched and planned, yet there were still many unknowns. In particular, neither of us really had any building experience to give us a basis in reality. Our house plan was more of a house hypothesis. It seemed like a good idea, but would it work? There was only one way to find out. One thing we learned walking across Montana is that the only way to get anywhere is to take it one step at a time and see what comes next. A previous owner once started development on the land we bought, so there was already a concrete slab on site, measuring approximately 30 X 95 feet. Coincidentally, our tentative house plans fit one section of the slab, and its footings, to within a couple feet in each direction. We threw out our house plans and grabbed a box of crayons. After a couple days of gesturing and imagining, we had a final, life-sized plan, with every wall out-lined right on the slab. |
Doing our slip-formed stone walls after that was considerably less intense. We used Steve Parsons' book, Stone Houses: A Design and Construction Handbook (out of print), as our primary guide in this department. We set forms along the crayon lines on the slab and started building. Through our research we had identified the slip-form technique as an easy, low-skill way for amateurs like us to put together straight, good-looking stone walls. We used simple forms, mostly 2 feet tall and 8 feet long, framed with 2 x 4's and faced with plywood. These are set on each side of the wall, wire-tied together, and braced apart. Stones are placed inside the forms with a good face against the plywood, and concrete is poured behind them. The walls can be faced with stone on one side, leaving a concrete wall on the other side, or faced on both sides. Most of our walls are faced on both sides. Reinforcing steel is placed horizontally and vertically throughout the concrete.
All along the way we strived to eliminate costs. We salvaged old lumber from the dump. We used old steel cables, barbed wire, and steel fence posts for much of our rebar. Our rocks were free from the local hills and fields. We did not have much money, but we found a lot of resources. Eventually the house became my full time project, and Renee earned the money to support us. Every time we had any money we would spend it all on some big project. Then she would go back to work, and I would go salvage a few boards somewhere and keep building. If we had the money all at once then I am sure the house would have ended up costing twice as much. But every time the money ran out we simply became more resourceful. Building without money causes a person to meditate a bit longer, to redesign individual projects to fit the available materials.
During our second summer we put up the logs for the upper story. I might emphasize that it is generally not advisable to switch building materials in this kind of a project. It requires twice as many tools and twice as much knowledge. But for us this was the equivalent of a college education, and we did not have enough knowledge at this point to be able to do anything else with our lives anyway, so we had time on our hands. Fortunately, my inlaws attended a log-building class, and learned about an exciting new low-skill, low-cost method of working with logs. I peeled all of our logs in a few days using a tool called a Log Wizard. It is essentially a planar blade that mounts on the end of a chainsaw. With the help of my inlaws, we put up the main part of the log work in about ten days. Later we helped them to build their 3000+ square foot log home. |
Construction usually proceeded slowly throughout the process, due to our chronic lack of money. We moved into the house that second year, although with no doors or windows and no insulation in the roof. When we were both home we took turns around the wood cook-stove, with one of us sitting on the oven door, and the other standing behind the stove. Our frigid Montana winter stopped about three feet from the stove. Renee said she was warmer when she was at work, leading teenagers on wilderness expeditions for three weeks at a time in Idaho. This might all seem a little rough, but I later realized that we saved at least $150,000 in interest payments by eliminating the need for a loan. That is not a bad wage for a couple years of camping out! We kept working on the house, and by spring it was quite survivable; by the next winter it was downright livable. Eventually we even got an indoor toilet, and later built a 600 square foot addition.
In Perspective
Economically, we were able to boost the value of our $10,000 income up to about $50,000 or $60,000 a year, tax free. We did this by adding value to the resources we purchased, and even more by avoiding interest payments on a loan.
Also, building our own home was the equivalent of a college education for us. Our house was our diploma, built and paid for. We had few marketable skills when we started, but many skills by the time we finished. We even built and sold another stone house along the way, and we plan to do more.
Most importantly, however, we got our Dream home, and the freedom to decide each day what we want to do. That freedom is important because we have a lot of interests. We are heavily immersed in the primitive, or stone-age skills, which we research, practice, publish, and teach through our own wilderness programs. That in itself is like going to school for a couple degrees--it takes a lot of time. We also research and publish on environmental economics, and we are working on plan to be able to "prefab" stone houses, to make them economical for more people to own. Each of these areas of interest requires that we have the freedom to sit back and meditate, to take the time to find out what complexities we can eliminate, so we can pick up the chisel at the end of the day and make our one strategic hit, to achieve our goals smoothly and easily.
For all the benefits we gained out of building our own home, I would still not recommend it to every person. Building a home has a way of becoming an education and a career. Do not try building a house only because you think you will save money; it does not work that way. Focus directly on your Dreams and make them your reality. Do that and you will always be successful.