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Building Your Own Hobbit Hole
Alien54 writes "Sometimes people go too far in being a fan of a great movie or of a great book. Now you can be the proud owner of a Hobbit Hole. The site offers basic plans, as well as technical resources. For example, one thing you might want to consider in your planning is Large Elliptical Precast Concrete Pipe."
Great. Just what a Geek needs. Something the promotes sunlight deprivation all teh more. *shakes head*
Really though, half of what makes Bag End from the movie so damn kewl was the woodwork and *THAT* isn't cheap. My uncle did it for a living (before going back to school again and becoming a newspaper editor) and the cost of godly woodwork of the Hobbit or Elf is enough to buy another whole house...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Build a monolithic dome and cover it with sod. Should work just as well. Monolithic domes are cool.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I wouldn't expect so. Just put down "pre-formed concrete" when asked for the construction method :-) Note that I am sure the design would have to be approved by a county/city engineer, but so does every house built.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
You are definitely right that it's not very practical. Even in the book (The Lord of the Rings) Tolkien mentions that most modern hobbits do not live in holes.
Only the very poor and the very rich hobbits live in holes. The poor hobbits live in holes because they can't afford to build a house, and the rich live in elaborate holes because it is traditional, and because they can afford to make them luxurious.
... anyway, that's what I remember reading. If anyone can confirm that I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, please do. (I can't find it in the book at the moment.)
Actually, if you listen to the director's commentary track on the special edition DVD, Peter Jackson says the head-bumping incident with Gandalf was an accident. It's a tribute to Sir Ian McKellen that he was able to go right on acting as if it was scripted...seems to have fooled a lot of people, including myself at first glance.
Judging by the Yoda-speak
"Yoda-speak" you can call it, but the technical term is "OSV typology", for "Object Subject Verb".
J.R.R. Tolkien's hobby was building fictional worlds and languages. The Lord of the Rings began as his back-story for a book about Elvish tongues. Some of his languages might have been OSV, but most were SVO like English.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The wife is already begging me to let us save our money so we can afford to realistically build of one these! ;-)
There are women as geeky as me!
--DarkFrog
If the dead rise again, we're going to have some serious population control issues.
I saw the history channel show about this and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had seen in a long time. But now it's for sale... check it out...
underground fortress
Um, as geometry would dictate, if you run a floor down a pipe, a large subfloor space is formed, more than enough for any duct, fiber, wire, or plumbing you can imagine. It'd be good for a lot of storage room, too.
Just remember to reserve the lowest point of the subfloor for the emergency drain pipe you will need in a heavy flood, or if those bored neighborhood geek kids drop a garden hose into your chimney and crank up the water.
But when a grown adult man daydreams about living in an underground wizard cave instead of about girls, money, and cars, I believe that there is a problem.
I don't doubt he dreams about girls; but some of us need other, more realistic dreams. Cars just aren't everyone's thing. He who truely dreams about money is lost; they get to spend their life in the cold and heartless chase of cash.
I doubt any of us live on grounds that are vast and mountainous enough to actually build one of these holes.
You doubt that any one of the tens of thousands of slashdot readers lives near a hill? Go back to geography class; just because you live in Kansas, doesn't mean we all do.
being a hero and saving everyone from a death by drowning. [...]imagine that you're a sexy, long-haired Mel Gibson.
Because these are such realistic goals. Instead of dreaming we're a hero in the ancient past, let's dream we're a seductive commoner in the recent past (who, IIRC, only saved one person) or a sleazebag who lies, and steals his way to the top and is a complete cad, but it's all right, because he has charisma and is Mel Gibson.
You offer us the sad myths of the modern world instead of the great myths of fantasy. Sorry, not interested. I'll try and take my modern world straight, and let my fantasies go where they may.
I hate to point out the obvious, but the floors wouldn't be curved. They'd be flat. And prolly made of wood. You lay beams across the tube, with supports cut to match the curve. Cover with subflooring, then cover with hardwood planks.
The cool thing about that is that you have natural conduit space under your floor.
Did you ever see cylindrical pressurized lunar habitation modules, back when the U.S. cared about space exploration? Same deal. The diff is that the lunar station are tubes to maintain enormous internal air pressure, compared to this bermed tube/pipe, which keeps out enormous masses of earth and water.
I remember the earth-sheltered homes built in the '70's. The big problem was leakage and cracks. This tube concept solves the cracking problem, and has Hobbity coolness to boot.
The way to go is tunnel liner, bolt-together segments used for making tunnels and small underpasses. Diameters to 6 meters are available standard, and to 36 meters by special order. Various cross sections are possible by mixing curved sections of different radii. You can get a nearly flat floor if desired.
Armtec's tunnel liner system isn't particularly good looking inside, but there are nicer ones, such as the ones used in newer Jubilee Line stations of the London Underground. The Tube is a good place to look for ideas on how to use curved underground spaces.
That is what you use electro-osmotic pulse systems for. He'd have to space these through the house, but further reasearch would be required.
This sig no verb.
I want to make it clear that this is extremely clever, and now I want one! But, here's a few ideas I have.
I don't think ceiling ductwork is optimal for the application - in fact, placing everything subfloor may be more optimal for aesthetic value, especially for the CAT5 and electrical. (Rather than have things plug into the ceiling or have the wall outlets run down from there, wire them up from the floor. Less intrusive.) It might help to raise the floor a couple of inches to accomodate everything, but the impact if you remove the ceiling (as it were) should be trivial. on the other hand, if you are required to install sprinklers by your local building code...well, still drop everything else below, but keep a trivial ceiling to accomodate the sprinkler system.
For acoustic purposes, the builder would be advised to place some kind of padding on the walls. Yes, I know, acoustic tiling is expensive and carpeted walls went out when the The Gobbler was torn down, but something should be done, or you won't be able to discreetly make love on the opposite end of the house from your guests with your SO.
Furnace and water should be placed centrally to all used utilities. In the floor plan, you will notice that the builder has the utility closet placed between the pantry and the secondary bath. I think if I were me, I would place the utility closet off of that unused corridor, facing into the center of the oblong there. It takes it a bit farther from the kitchen, but it puts it significantly closer to the master bedroom, and unless you heavily insulate the pipes, heat lossage will be cut down significantly by doing this. The problem can be countered of course by installing secondary heaters as appropriate.
The chimney in the kitchen is a very smart touch, but an exhaust system in the bathrooms would be very optimal to keep those after-use odors down. =O.o=.
Take that secondary bath away from that side corridor. Put another attached to the bedroom/study/zen room branch, and another on that other corridor that is not used in the floorplan. It may seem redundant, but you don't (for one thing) want bathrooms *too* close to the kitchen or pantry, and you'll find a bathroom closer to the bedrooms and common areas of the home to be of significant convenience.
And where's that fireplace in the living room, hmm? =^_^=
As mentioned in another post of mine, make sure you install an electro-osmotic pulse system to keep those walls dry and intact.
This sig no verb.
Fiberglass is the way to go. Concrete in the ground isn't too good. My dad works for a fiberglass company, mainly in the area of manholes. He's shown me a lot of pictures of concrete manholes that basically rot out of the ground. Sure it'll be good for a few years, but you want to protect your investment! Fiberglass tanks can come just as big. Just need to put something on the inside so you don't get the itches.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Hi all! /. I have gotten a lot of good feedback and ideas on how to make the structure better.
First I wanted to thank whoever posted this to
But allow me to make a few observations and corrections.
There are eight fire exits and they are listed on the site.
Six rooms, the ones most used, have direct sunlight. You may not be able to see the windows in the pictures, but you have windows in the master bath, master bedroom, living room, foyer, kitchen and dining room. Plus you have skylights in the zen room and the study.
The space under the floors is at least 18 inches deep which can leave you up to 9 feet of headroom. I think that is enough. The curved walls can also be used to build closets and trunks without taking up floor space or clog the halls.
I have some concerns with other building methods because of the crushing weight of soil that would need to be dumped on the structure. The plan would not be to excavate, but to find a somewaht flat ground, lay the pipe, apply several layers of moisture barrier and then cover with many feet of soil and landscape. Rain itself would add several TONS of roof loading in a matter of minutes. Also, the point of this is to have a LOW amount of labor-hours. Most rammed earth structures takes years of spare time to build.
The use of pipe means you can configure the dwelling anyway you want; ringed, linear or multilevel. for example, if you build it as a ringed structure, you can have an open-air garden in the middle with all rooms being open to it. My example is just ONE example.
My goal for this site was to simply come up with yet ANOTHER idea for home construction that is not based on the traditional house. Who knows if anyone ever builds it? As I said on the site, I am just "expressing my inner architect."
Storm Bear Williams
The locals live under ground.
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http://www.walkabout.com.au/locations/SACooberP
Just do a google search on "Coober Pedy" and read away.
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