$300 Forest House (click to enlarge)

Description: Do you dream of having a small place in the woods that can be built practically for free? The Forest House with its striking pyramid roof is made almost entirely of natural products that are readily available in tropical forests – wood poles, bamboo and thatch. Recycled doors, cabinets, sink, composting toilet, solar shower and other materials, plus building on a hillside keep costs to a minimum. Consider leasing the land or work-trade agreement. Features include steeply pitched roof to shed rain, open ceiling to improve ventilation, built-in desk, retractable plank and metal barriers on each post to deter pests. Options include under-bed storage, mosquito bed net, split bamboo (shown) or bamboo matt, split bamboo or wood plank floors, rustic curved wood railings. Building permit not required. High speed Internet not included.

$300 Forest House floorplan (click to enlarge)

About 130 affordable house plans at Earthbag House Plans.

Roofed dome by Superadobe Construccion Blogspot (click to enlarge)

Kentucky Dome Home roofed dome.

Rob Wainwright's roofed dome in Australia

Dome with embedded rafters at Blog Daum.net

Earthen domes evolved in deserts. Due in part to the beautiful and interesting shape, people started building earthen domes in rainier climates. But domes are more vulnerable to moisture damage than roofed structures. Without a roof, domes are exposed to the rain and snow. Plaster will eventually crack and when it does moisture can cause serious damage. One option is to build roofed domes as shown in the photos above.

Image source: Superadobe Construccion Blogspot
Image source: Kentucky Dome Home
Image source: Rob Wainwright dome in Australia
Image source: Dome with embedded rafters at Blog Daum.net

Rustic wood ceiling by Whole Log Lumber

Barnwood ceiling by Stout Carpentry

Open beam ceiling by Vintage Timberworks

‘Naily grade’ wood by Whole Log Lumber

Recycled wood or reclaimed wood ceilings add warmth and character to a room. Each ceiling is unique, and the final result often looks better than new wood. Not only can you save a lot of money if you gather your own salvaged wood and build the ceiling yourself (which isn’t particularly difficult), no new trees have to be cut down. This means recycled wood ceilings are eco-friendly, especially when the wood is locally sourced. Reclaimed/recycled wood ceilings can last almost indefinitely and don’t have to be painted. Rustic wood ceilings are often made with old wood timbers (beams and joists) and planks of old recycled lumber. You can combine rustic wood planks with box beams for special effect.

A wide range of woods can be used – barnwood or barn boards, rough sawn pine, beetle kill pine, naily wood, unique hand-hewn antique woods, old growth wood (stronger and typically more beautiful and durable than new), remilled wood, knotty wood, pallet wood, beadboard, tongue and groove, recycled trim. You can mill almost any wood for ceilings if you have a bandsaw mill (blow downs, wood from tree trimmers, etc.). For more wood ideas, check out our blog post on Low Cost Wood for DIY Homebuilders.

Image source: Whole Log Lumber
Image source: Stout Carpentry
Image source: Vintage Timberworks

Another video tip sent by Pleabargain.

Typical starter home in SE Asia

US: 2×4 frame, sheetrock, pressed board siding, OSB on wood floor joists, synthetic vinyl and carpet, wood trusses, OSB roof sheathing, asphalt shingles, particle board cabinets, plastic laminate countertops, modern plumbing and electrical and Internet. $100/sq. ft. Approximate construction cost (can vary significantly): $60,000

SE Asia and Mexico: concrete slab, reinforced concrete post and beam, mortared brick infill between posts, cement plaster, steel frame roof, tile roof, brick or block cabinets covered in tile, tile countertops, tile floors, modern plumbing, electrical and Internet. $34/sq. ft. Approximate construction cost (can vary significantly): $20,000

This example shows roughly triple construction costs in the US due to a number of reasons. Note, generalizations like this have all sorts of exceptions and details that can blur the main point. For instance, much of the US is colder and this explains some of the higher costs for heating systems, insulation, etc. But when you take into account the higher quality building materials used in Mexico and SE Asia, the US housing market is a giant flaming ripoff.

Have you seen recent charts of US housing prices? Some experts say the downward trend could continue indefinitely (10-20 years or more) since so many jobs have been exported to other countries. They’re basically saying how can house prices go back up if people don’t have jobs. Homes sales are so abysmal that realtors have admitted double counting to slow the downward slide.

Comparison of the percentage change in the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for the housing corrections in the periods beginning in 2005 (red) and the 1980s–1990s (blue)

Image source: Thailand Blogs
Related:
American Housing Ripoff
Trailer Houses versus Earthbag
How to Build Houses That Will Self Destruct and Burn Like Crazy

Pleabargain, one of our readers, sent us a link to this video. This mobile tiny house includes lots of useful ideas that could be used in any small house. Note the size of house shown in the book she has. Full sized houses used to cost $3,500 and now you can’t even build the bathroom for that price.

“In a town where the median home price is over half a million dollars, Jenine Alexander decided to build her own. Using resources like the tiny house blogs and the 1950 bestselling DIY book “Your Dream Home: How to Build It for Less Than $3,500″ (a gift from a friend), Jenine spent less than $3,500 on her home. In fact, she used nearly only materials recovered from the dump or found on craigslist and the only things she paid for were a used trailer and fasteners (nails, screws, hinges, etc). She built it on wheels not just to get around minimum size standards, but mostly because she couldn’t afford land in her hometown of Healdsburg, California.”

Original story here.

This is another great video by Faircompanies.com. So far all of their videos I’ve watched have combined a good story, professional filming and lots of useful details. Watch more videos like this at Fair Companies YouTube channel.

A curved sofa like this would look great in a rounded corner.

Image source: Creative Leather Furniture

Kelly Hart’s Carriage House combines insulated earthbags of scoria with a manufactured steel Quonset hut.

I’m in my mid 40′s and it boggled my mind that I’d have been a slave for my entire life, +5 years just to own a plywood & plasterboard shack that requires constant maintenance to not disintegrate, especially in the humid South. The bankers really do want you to become an adult, and then work for them for your entire life until you die, paying them rent, the pharma groups not far behind, with their belief that everyone of us needs to be on lifelong medications just to line their pockets. Ridiculous.

Another reason for pushing these 50 year mortgages, by the way, is that the robo-signing scandal and real estate fraud that took place during the bubble puts them in serious jeopardy of losing during the foreclosure process, in court, if those people have a good lawyer. By getting fresh signatures on new, proper, documents and invalidating the old fraudulent documents, they gain a much stronger position in any future foreclosure process, and as a final bonus, they also turn some non-recourse mortgages into full recourse mortgages, if state law allows this. ”

Owen: How true. People are waking up to the new reality big time. Take away people’s homes, and make other housing alternatives unaffordable (high rent, excessive building fees), and people are bound to start looking for low cost options. Geez, people can’t even afford a garage now, let alone a decent house. So they start surfing the Internet and see all the cool earthbag and strawbale houses, and other natural building methods using pallets, adobe, earth floors and plaster, ferrocement, pole building, and so on. I look forward to the day when the masses snap out of it and make more sensible choices. The times they are a changin’.

Kelly Hart’s Carriage House plan
This method of adding insulated bags over a manufactured steel vault is a great way to build – very fast and efficient, just bolt together, stack lightweight scoria bags, then plaster. And, it’s easy to get code approval. If you like vaults, this is probably the best way to go.

James (ECHO Asia intern) and Lue (Assistant Seed Bank Director) were trained in earthbag house construction by Engineering Ministries International (eMi).  To prevent the invasion of surrounding warmer air (the seed bank is located in a tropical/sub-tropical region), a small door with a foam interior and a thick but light ceiling composed of sacks filled with burnt rice husks were installed.  And to keep costs low, almost the entire structure was made from local, cheap materials, including a roof of fan palm thatch.

Data loggers will be installed to record the interior temperature and relative humidity.  These will be compared with outside readings over a period of one year. So we look forward to reporting on the long term results of the modification of temperature by the earthbag house and the potential of such structures for community-based seed storage in the tropics.

See sustainabilityquest.blogspot.com to read the entire article.