kaz said:
Dax, what specs/materials did you use/have in your home construction and would you say it was much more expensive than normal construction. Thanks.
What do you mean by specs, each build has different specifications and materials, depending on site location and on site materials. My first home is quite different to those we build now, simply because I used it as the test bed for constructing earthen homes.
The one we live in now, is 400sqm and has the same steel frame, with 1.5m of rammed earth roof, finished on the outside with locally sourced bluestone. Interior walls vary from plastered lime 50cm walls to rocks of various types, sourced from the property and a couple of timber featured walls.
The typical home we build, provides just about all materials from the site, or sourced close by. The construction in most cases consists of a steel frame, just like you see them use in building a factory, capable of handling 1'5m of soil on top of it. Then the earthen mix is poured into form work and rammed, until it reached she steel frame above it, so no walls are load bearing, but help in bearing the load. The steel uprights are sat in concrete piers set in the bedrock, floors are a combination of sand, gravel and rammed clay, or other local material treated naturally to bind and keep it strong, then sealed and polished using our own method and natural materials. You can hit them with a sledge hammer and you may dent the floor, but thats it. There are no nails in our homes, all doweled timber, again we try to use local sources so make the dowels.
The walls range from being all soil, to window area's which have 500mm density walls mostly, but that depends on the owner and are all double glassed. Each entrance and there are normally 2, have air locks. The roofing materials are earth and below that, our own designed water catchment system, so when the roof is saturated, the water runs out and fills our inground tanks. It also acts as a wonderful filter, although where we are we have the cleanest rain water on the planet they say.
If you do it yourself, you can build a 200-300sqm home complete for way less than $100000, my first earthen home cost me less than $4000, as I used everything from the land and only had to buy the windows and some other stuff. Now we build the windows as we go, they don't open so it reduces the price considerably.
Then you can buy yourself 3-6 shipping containers, put them in the ground in whatever configuration you want, weld them together and you have a home very cheap. All you need it a few layers of building plastic, sitting on top of some commercial ply and bingo a waterproof strong cheap home.
Lived and worked in Canberra and surrounds for more than 10 years building, our standard earthen home suits the climate excellently and there is one of our homes in Narrabundah, one in Michelago, Cooma, near Nimmitabel and a lodge at Adaminiby, to name a few.
Posted Saturday 16 Jul 2016 @ 12:59:21 am from IP
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