Find a great piece of land. Before you buy it, dig deep into it with your shovel, see how deep the top soil is. Google 'top soil' and look at all the articles on the subject. Put in your orchard and your vegetable garden following the TEACHINGS you find at THE GARDEN INDEX. You can camp on it for years, coming on weekends. Once the orchard is in, you want to build the house.Often there will be no land use taxes if you build a house on your land. Don't let a lack of money keep you from building. Do the house with regional organic methods. Tires, Strawclay! Many of us own homes on very clay like soil. This can be amended so that you can garden, but clay has a fabulous use. Building your rural, country home! I wrote the expert about this.
DEAR TIV: The Clay soil in my yard is hard as cement after El nino rains. Knives bounce off it. Shovel can't pierce a dune. Woe is me for moving here. But you're telling me I can mix straw with it, pour it into FORMS and let it dry into building bricks? What an idea? Clay/straw houses are just SOIL poured into plywood forms?
"ANSWER: There are a large number of building techniques that use earth. Some are traditional, like strawclay; some new, like earth-ships made from tires packed with dirt; some are updated versions of traditional methods, like adobe with added stabilizers so it will work in wet climates.
Strawclay is mostly straw packed into forms. There are also techniques that are mostly dirt either packed while only damp to poured almost like concrete. Wattle and daub is an other traditional infil for post and beam. It uses a woven layer of sticks (willow is traditional) and is covered in mud. VISIT http://www.solarliving.org/
They have classes, sessions, 2 day or 5 day. 9 mos a year. But their site doesn't show you everything. Or even very much. I liked the page of BOOKS http://store.solarlivingstore.com/nabubo.html
As often you can buy these books for 4$ or even a buck at ABEBOOKS.comTake almost any soil and amend it with cement, lime or sometimes even an oil like linseed oil and it becomes a stable building material. Cover the outside with a stucco of either cement or lime and it is weatherproof enough for any climate in the world.
Mark Lung lived in a straw-bale house in Gunnison, Colo., before moving to Boise. While there, he carefully charted the temperatures over an extended period. The outside temperature ranged from 20 to 80 degrees. Inside, the temperature stayed between 68 and 72 - without supplemental heat or cooling. SEE:
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2009/11/09/966167/a-house-made-of-straw-and-mud.html
He mounts enough rebar to go through the first straw bale into the cement foundation then uses sharpened bamboo to secure the bales on top of the first. The bales are set on two rails with a trough in the middle that is used for electrical conduit, which is fun up any of the posts that are every 8' in the wall. The dirt removed for the foundation is used in forming the wall plaster.
The whole house does not have to be straw and wattle At a list, T Canava says : I'm the cheapest person I know. Instead of buying a house I put an ad in the paper saying FREE HOUSE DEMOLITION... I got my pick of houses. I took the house that had best wood features apart and hauled it to my land and rebuilt it. (We assume he means doors, door frames, lumber, beams, bricks, features that give a country home BEAUTY.) Instead of paying thousands on a mortgage I pay $221.00 a month for the land."Now, a dessert for your eyes, an amazingly beautiful,
spiritual Medeival home in Wales. This would be easy to build. Cost this fellow 3thousand pounds, is that like 5k? HUGE, well fitted, and very pleasant on the eyes. Ya have a feeling if local codes would allow this? See more pics at: http://www.simondale.net/house/
http://www.simondale.net/house/build.htm
GREAT WEB SITE ON BUILDING FOUNDATIONS INEXPENSIVELY
<--- BACK TO ANITA SANDS WEBSITE
<---- BACK TO GUERILLA CAPITALISM SITE
<---- BACK TO GARDEN INDEX.