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Build a House Out of Recycled Cardboard
Uosdwis writes "Well for a better environmental option to a new house that is affordable, "low cost". Australia architects Stutchbury and Pape have created a house out of recycled cardboard, Velcro, nylon wing nuts and tape. Also , most of the house is recyclable too. It can be built in six hours by two people and can be transportable in a light commercial vehicle. Viva homeownership!" We had a story a few years about a school built out of cardboard.
I prefer paper!!! omg lol ror wtf bbq hahahah
Oh, and by the way, I can just imagine the SLOGAN:
"Cardboard houses: Not just for homeless anymore!"
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
I'd watch where I spilled fluids.
People in glasshouses get stoned.
People in cardboard houses....get burnt?
Ouch.
I shudder to think what the smell would be like if a toilet overflows.
_____
Thank you.
Step 1 - Get laid off from job, live in cardboard box on street.
Step 2 - Convince media that this is the future of housing materials.
Step 3 - Profit!
Gee, this story seems so familiar...
The site says -
At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications.
So, is that US $35,000 or AU $35,000?
If it's the latter, it's really quite cheap and could be helpful to build cheap, sustainable housing. Hell, I'm an out-door buff and I'd love to buy one of these that can be reused when I go on long treks and climbs.
Sure as hell beats living in a tent for weeks on end.
I can see folks like archaelogists loving this sort of thing - they go on long digs where they'd really need to set shop, and nothing would come close to something like this. Best of all, this provides for an excellent place for storing artifacts and the like and in setting shop.
However, I think that for Joe Regular to buy it, it would perhaps need to be a *little* cheaper - US $5,000 or so.
"Hello, I'd like to order ten plain cheeze pizzas..."
Whatever you do, make sure it won't rain.
I've never been under the impression cardboard and paper are very effecient fiberwise. Is this cleaner and cheaper than wood?
Good time to make an article about this. It will come especially handy in Florida with all the hurricanes and such. I just saved 15% or more on house insurrance.
Why didn't this article come out yesterday?
I just took all my cardboard to the recycling center. There was a lot of it too. I could have at least build the first floor.
High society will live in elegant, custom constructed cardboard houses, and people who are down on their luck will be found, living in alleys in shitty brick houses.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Australia architects Stutchbury and Pape...
So are they colleagues of Slartibarfast?
What happens to the structure if it should... I don't know... rain ?
Seriously, for those of you who don't RTFA, You could live in one while your permanent house is being built or renovated, for emergency housing, or for short-term accommodation. That's about what it looks like, too. You wouldn't spend the rest of your life in one of these.
But the real question is, how much does this MacGyver house cost? At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications. It is lightweight, transportable, requires no more skill to erect than an Ikea product, and is very affordable. That's about $27,000 US dollars.
Nice concept. Wake me when they're mass-produced.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
People have been living in card board boxes forever.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
I'm not a homeless advocate. I probably should have more sensitivity to the needs of my fellow sojourner and all, but I've got a full plate already, what with Slashdot and, uh, well, I guess that's about all I do.
There always seems to be a disconnect between what people really need (a roof, a door to lock, three hots and a cot) and what society insists they need (a three-bedroom ranch with vinyl siding and brick trim).
If it were available, I'd live in a little A-frame like that. Shower at the gym, do deskwork at the library. Gotta have a place for my generator and a closet for my aunt, but other than that I'd be set.
sigs, as if you care.
Cardboard is a great insulator (or at least corrugated cardboard). I'm sure is saved many a homeless person from death.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Now if only they could find a way to make it strong enough for the building codes for hurricane protection...
That thing looks like it will fly away in a regular thunderstorm.
Thunder.. hmm. Lightning and cardboard. Yes. Good idea.
I think I'll stick to brick and concrete.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
"Well for a better environmental option to a new house that is affordable, "low cost"
Are the grammar editors asleep again ?
Thunderbird not included.
That'd be a bitch
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This will bring in a new generation of more envirmentally friendly trailer trash.
Okay, nice page, but what about fire and pests (ants, wasps etc.)? What about storms? Is it well insulated? It seems to me that it doesn't have real windows, just the plastic cover -- that's definitely a no-no if you're somewhere where it gets cold in winter. Plus, if the composting part of the toilet is mounted below the floor, out in the cold, it will not work in winter.
where's all that Karma?
I've got a match that says your house sucks.
As soon as you find a woman willing to accept this fine recycled cardboard engagement ring.
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
come on! This is slashdot.
How much does it cost to keep a goat in one of these things?
Why UNIX?
I've lived in a 'cardboard' box for quite a while. Images here show the houses. Quite cheap, really cold in winter, and really hot in summer. In a couple of weeks these will be torn down, or actually, the screws taken out of them, put on the back of a lorry and driven out.
i'd say it beats a trailer.
*cough* that's better. Now, the fact is that down the in (British) West Country, we've been building sustainable housing for years. here's a straw house, for example - alas it fell foul of the planning regs and the local council are insisting it be demolished; but it'll be back up in a day or two.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Excuse me, Mr Beowulf.
Did you say that you would Huff and Puff and blow my house down?
Anonymous Piggy
There's a guy around the corner from my office who built a house out of an overpass and some plastic bags.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All I can say is, nobody, and I mean NOBODY is allowed to smoke or light candles in my new house.
Sunny
Be my Friend
The word for affordable housing is YURT. Check them out and you will see this is a huge joke. Hobbit Holes anyone? No one cares if it is US dollars or Australian. It is still overpriced and under developed.
and possibly cheaper too...
adobe, a house made out of soil and clay...
(not the software company)
ur right d00d! i am l33t and won't stand 4 th1s! teh f1rst HURRiCAN3 would pwnz0r teh thing! fsck that! my /home will be a concrete d0m3!!! it's like the OpenBSD of h0us1ng or sumthin!
That's how I read it when you say things like that.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down...
is in the use of duct tape to hold everything together. It may be hard to heat, but at least it is terrorist-proof!
People in cardboard houses shouldn't throw matches.
Seriously, I don't get this. We've got a reasonable solution for temporary housing, and it's not as wasteful as this. Mobile homes! They are cheaper, last longer, and are easier to setup and/or move. Admitted, a cardboard house is recycled, so we aren't chopping down a small stand of trees to produce it, but can't we re-use cardboard in another fashion? Is there a need to build a home out of cardboard? Overall, it seems like a good idea until bad things happen, and then a cardboard house isn't very appealing. Thieves, arsonists, storms, and the high cost make this unappealing.
-- No sig for you!
Also , most of the house is recyclable too.
You know, here in the southern USA, we have been disassembling and rebuilding houses with old materials for years.
If you can find a condemned house from around the turn of the century, there is often several thousand pounds of very good quality wood that can be pulled, cleaned up, and applied to new projects.
On another note, most homes are built using a large amount of sheetrock. This is cheap and durable, oh yes, and often made from recycled materials. If you really look around your home, you are going to find a lot of recycled materials.
Then again, by reading this, I guess the submitter thinks wood is not enviromentally friendly or cheap.
verry innovative, now white trash can live in trash. coming soon to a trailer park near you!
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
How many poor families are paying a lot more than $300 month and still have utility bills that the cardboard house doesn't need? Plenty, I bet. I bet you are too.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Frank Lloyd Wright developed concrete housing that reused wooden forms (the biggest expense).
g ht.html
. shtml
http://149849284.home.icq.com/frank%20lloyd%20wri
All steel Lustron housing were another attempt at affordable housing.
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/stories/Detailed/12270
One of the companies I work for built a similar system recently.
We typically build patio sunrooms out of plywood laminate and foam-core insulation (Styrofoam in the middle), but as it turns out, the material also can be used to provide extremely inexpensive housing for Mexicans whose houses were destroyed in an intense storm.
So yes, American corporations are behind such technology. It's very profitable.
Could such a product be used in the united states? No, you're probably correct, such a product would likely not pass building code. It's hard enough to get the patio rooms to pass code in most of Florida, but to prove safety in actually living in the thing would prove impossible.
way to go , Bush'ites!
Or a more pragmatic reason for rejecting this type of housing - stability against adverse weather conditions. I live in the southeastern United States. Tornados are a ubiquitous threat and I can safely expect one hurricane a year on average. Sure a cardboard house as proposed is quite a novel idea, but given the record of weather in this region I'll stick with wood and brick houses regardless of price so that my life is not threatened by weather.
and to think i used to make jokes abot people living in cardboard condos.
I will not be using Plan 9 in the creation of weapons of mass destruction to be used by nations other than the US.
So this must be the house Calvin & Hobbes will live when they grow up. Of course, when it's right side up, it will be time machine; when sideways, a transmogrifier; and when upside down, a duplicator.
Granted he later perfected the transmogrifier in the form of a small gun, but the corrugated cardboard method still works just as well.
Of course the elite would not accept this. They'll live in palaces. Duh.
This is for the neo-serf.
The media, government, and corporations are up to something, but you've got this all backwards. They want this. They can't publically want this, or want it too much, so expect them to downplay it a bit. But if say, for instance, some uber-rich european banker wants to have all of us literally living in cardboard boxes, while he swims in vaults full of gold that have more money than any orthodox economist would admit exists in the total economy of planet earth, well, who are corporations or government bureaucrats to say otherwise?
Yes, we're pack animals. That's no longer ideal, they want soul-less little robots, with just enough of a shred of dignity to still be humiliated by what they've been turned into. Why do you think a wife at home with children is the exception, and not the rule anymore? So, yes, you can live in one of these, if you like, the wife will be gone in 5 years anyway.
Besides, you sound ambitious enough, maybe clever enough, that you can secure a minor position in the Inner Party. I mean, you seem to want to get rid of our "hard-wired social status competition" personalities...
Houses aren't like tin cans or newspapers. People don't use them once and then toss them away. The cardboard house has an expected lifespan of 20 years. I'd say virtually all conventional houses that were built 20 years ago are still in use, and most will probably still be in use 20 years from now.
If you want to be environmentally friendly, why not build a wood house and keep it for 50 years?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Yes, you can make houses out of almost anything.
Thomas Edison was playing with this idea almost 100 years ago (with concrete prefabricated house shells). The bad news is that a shed is still a shed. Unless you have damp course (to stop water from the soil) you will have serious problems with our friends the fungi. After WWII, in the UK, there was an attempt to rebuild infrastructure using "prefab" houses (mostly asbestos etc). Took a long time to get everyone out of what was supposed to be temporary housing even there in UK. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Might be fun here in the med where its drier though...
Now, which island do i want my cardboard house on.
(2000+ to choose from)?
Cheers,
Andy Allen
Athens Greece
This makes me think of the episode where Homer walks through the walls in Japan instead of using the door. You couldn't keep that many valueables inside such a house.
involving interesting buildings. Such as one guy who built what seemed to me a superb house out of straw bales. He chainsawed the bales into shape. then covered them in an inpermeable layer. Damn fine idea. Lasts according to the show some 30+ years(fingers crossed i guess) but it does put this post in perspective. This has been done, kinda. It is doable. and should be done. It strikes me hay/straw bales would be better for since they can be shaped real well and provide great insulation. viva green principles.....
bowls.
We'd get a big refrigerator box and I'd have a ball cutting windows and wiriing lights in it.
And I swear I get high from the formaldehyde fumes!
The deluxe model is made out of recycled shopping carts, and rolls.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Is the styrofoam proofed against fire in any way? Also are there suitable non-oil alternatives (Rockwool) that could be used with a lower overall oil footprint (i.e. related to oil cost of extraction, processing, energy saving)?
Cardboard is a solid fiber material, used for thin boxes (think, toothpaste tube box) and tablet backings. Corrugated is the proper term for the material with flat sheets separated by fluted sheets.
As far as waterproofing, it's actually quite economical to make corrugated products completely waterproof. Just last monnth I was at the TAPPI/AICC SuperCorrExpo in Atlanta. That's the every-4-years trade show for corrugated machinery. The booth across the aisle from one of mine had a laminating machine which can coat paper with polyurethane. They had a little waterfall display which showed how resistant the board was. http://www.kohlercoating.com/
There was a similar display in another booth but their sample was only coating the outer surface, not all surfaces during the corrugating process. Similar methods are used to ship some delicate vegetables packed in ice to grocery stores.
We have a patent on a metering machine which allows cold adhesives to be used during the corrugating process. All other methods use large amounts of heat and steam to soften the paper and get the glue (cornstarch) to stick. The "normal" method reduces the strength of the board. We've done experiments with our machine to use multiple layers of medium (the wavy paper in the middle) and various cold adhesives which result in corrugated board almost as strong as solid wood. It was so strong traditional knives in converting machinery could not cut it.
When we did those experiments years ago I wondered about the market for "disposable" housing. The design shown in this article is hideously awkward. I was thinking more about single-level block-type housing which could be made from standardized flat pieces of our super-strong board. Throw in the full waterproofing I've mentioned above and you'd have pretty good pre-fab with strength and environmental resistance somewhere between wood and steel with a fraction of the weight. I'd envisioned something sort of like the flat pieces of a gingerbread house. The edges could even be made notched to hold the boards in place while some form of glue and reinforcement could be used to join the boards.
Having said all of that, corrugated steel is highly transportable and darn strong. It would be as easily worked by hand but it's more durable than any wood-based product.
The sample shown in the article is a joke. There's no way to economically treat corrugated after it's made. You could immerse it in polymers and take care to force it through all the flute spaces but it will still have huge structural weaknesses and be vulnerable to water. The vast majority of paper fibers used to make corrugated and non-print-surface cardboard outside the U.S. use recycled fibers which are shorter than virgin and very weak. Recycling paper breaks the fibers down. Strength of paper comes from multiple adhesions of fibers and proper adhesive. Recycled board is just not suited for something like housing.
This would be more appropriate for building a geodesic dome..
..
Using the inherent strength of the dome to compensate for the fact you are using paper
Could still use the same sort of techniques, and be 'portable'.... Plus you get more 'space' for the same amount of material.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That looks more like a big shed or a medium sized garage.
Also, I would think that the nylon and velcro are not as environmentally friendly as wood, brick and mortar.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Maybe they come supplied with a set of strong bungee cords to hold the house down during storms? :-)
Oh well.
Well, let's see, maybe I should punch in a whole bunch of other trash in here to take up lots of room and make it look like as though I got lots of stuff to be talking about, but as you can see, I am totally bored out of my mind and I have nothing interesting to say. Except that Windows XP is the suxx0rz because you have to type ipconfig instead of ifconfig.
I'm sure the velcro / tape / plastic type products are recyclable.. But better for the environment? If its made out of anything that resembles normal plastic, those suckers will be around for a long, LONG time... That and I really don't see the point in doing something like this... wood_and_nails are tried and true, are just as recyclable (like I can't turn lumber that was in a house into something like... say.. cardboard?), and I would assume require a whole lot less processing / industrial biproduct to fabricate than something like cardboard or velcro... If jesus had a house like that, the velcro would still be around somewhere today (and probably on ebay). If you are really environmentally conscious, build a house out of wood and plant 6 trees in your back yard..
It turns out that Polystyrene (aka styrofoam) is also a viable and cost-effective building material, currently being planned for deployment in Afghanistan by the Federation of American Scientists. According to this blog entry, "the New Harmony House (in New Harmony, Indiana) was built using this material as a demonstration, with impressive results (including the house using 50-70 percent less energy than a conventionally-constructed home)."
Great "the house of the future" looks like it came out of the 1976 David Bowie movie "The Man Who Fell To Earth".
Before you buy one find out how "temporary" the houses are? They keep repeating it so I assume we aren't talking 35 years. It's pretty basic so I'm quessing you could build a traditional wood structure of the same size and shape for around the same price. A wood structure can last hundreds of years. Sure it can be assembled in a couple of hours but that's not including a finished interior. Got to say it's a lot for a disposible house.
Who cares about sledgehammers and pouring water on the outside. Here's some of the things I'd like demonstrated:
1 - Humidity resistance. Place the thing in humid conditions for a few years and let's see if there is any structural weakening or fungal growth. Normal cardboard will rot and absorb water from the air (making it heavier and weakening it structurally) very quickly.
2 - Flood damage. What happens if the thing goes under 1 foot of water. A normal house needs major interior repairs, but remains structurally sound.
3 - Insulation. Done right, cardboard is a decent insulator, and they can always put in extra, but for a house with a 20 year design life, I have a feeling that decent insulation has been omitted. The house also has a very low thermal mass.
4 - Paper Acid. Unless they're using acid-free paper to make the cardboard, the acid will eat and weaken the structure. Judging from how long books printed on paper with acid last, I'd say 20 years should leave the structure weak enough to be condemned. Of course, if they're using hemp cardboard, then they're in the clear (but it might get them into legal trouble).
5 - Wiring. Inverters don't grow on trees and using 12V wiring means much thicker wires will be needed. To provide 12kW of capacity (typical of a modern built house), the wires would have to sustain 1,000 A or current, which would entail some pretty fat wiring as well as precautions to prevent the self-impedence (which is substantial at 1000 amperes) from generating dangerous sparks. You'll also need an inverter for each of your appliances (unless you can find custom built 12V DC ones), and I just cringe at how expensive an inverter for central air conditioning is. Also, if you want to connect to the grid, you'll need a rectifier also capable of handling heavy loads. I really do wonder what they were thinking of using 12V. 12V is good for a boat or a car, but its got no place in a house.
6 - Hurricane and tornado resistance. If you live in hurricane country, I sure hope its tied down well, because that thing looks like it'll blow away being so light and having no foundation. Come to think of it, it probably acts a lot like a mobile home in a hurricane.
7 - Maintenance costs. I would disagree with their rosy outlook. If I have the normal amenities (air conditioning, heat, a computer, TV, telephone, cable), I'll be paying more per month for this house than a well built steel, concrete, or wooden house. High heating and cooling bills because of poor insulation. Unsightly wires because there's no place to hide them. Having to depreciate the thing over 20 years instead of the 100+ that a well built house will last. Hard to resell house, unless these things become very popular, so you'll take a big hit in moving unless you lug the piece of junk with you. If I were to buy a property with such cheap construction, it would be to get to the land, and I wouldn't pay a cent more than the land is worth minus demolition costs.
In Pigeon Cove, near Rockport, Massachusetts starting in 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman built a house out of tightly rolled, varnished newspaper. He also built furniture for the house including tables, chairs, cabinets, bookcases, a piano, and a grandfather clock.
The front of the grandfather clock incorporates newspapers from the capital cities of each of the (then) forty-eight states, all oriented so that the name of the paper and city neatly face forward and are readable, although the varnish has gotten quite dark with age.
The house survives today. It is just off by itself in on a little nondescript road. There is relatively little publicity. No visitor's area or parking lot, you just park on the street.
I don't think I would travel a great distance to see it, but if I were in the Cape Ann area I certainly would take a look at it. Well worth half-an-hour of anyone's time. You are aware of being in the presence of someone very original who by gosh knew what he wanted to do and did it.
More here and here.
(Oh, and I think the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison, Wisconsin also has or had a demonstration house built out of some kind of cardboard-like material).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A composting toilet system produces nutrient-rich water for gardening.
the chinese used human faeces in the past, this is known as 'night soil'.
although nutrient-rich, it has a very dangereous counterside: is spreads diseases. human bacils get on crops eaten by humans.. generally this is not a good idea.i would have prefered some methane reactor that provides in heating and/or electricity.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Big bad wolf anyone? Unless these are cardboard bricks I think I'll pass.
" > although I can almost guarantee they won't take off.
except in a strong wind!"
I see a paternity suit in your future.
It looks pretty cool, but why did they leave the interior horizontal beams pointing down at an angle towards the interior of the house? Sure, they're perpindicular to the outer walls, a structural artifact for loadbearing. But why not angle them parallel to the floor? Either structurally, or by adding a complementary wedge to fill the intervening angle. Then they could be used as shelves, for storage of posessions, or mounting insulation before covering with interior skin (or both). Otherwise, those pitched walls make the space as unlivable as its predecessor, the inhumanly efficient geodesic dome.
--
make install -not war
not to mention really cool looking.
http://www.icosavillage.com/
you can get a good composting toilet system for less than a grand. please post your best option for power generation (quiet, cheap, efficient, etc) and storage if you have experience with this.
everything is closer than you think.
Blah. Slashdotters will never buy this, unless they make one out of duct tape ;)
...for someone to design a house I can build out of my vast collection of AOL CDs.
Of course it is not a troll; it was one of the best comments on this thread, if I do say so myself. However, most of my /. comments are modded down by the rightwing bots that infest this site.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Honestly i really don't want to be a troll, but it seems like this thing will take off in the next storm, either that or it will soak up all the rain and crush under its own weight. I'm sure there are other ways of creating an economical house that someone could actually use.
You're soaking in it right now! A sizable precentage of ALL crops grown in the world use human feces as frtilizer ( but not much in the western world, I think).
eat shiat and bark at the moon
At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications.
Uh, "short-term", as in, "until the next time it rains"???
A pretty cool concept but you better not light a fart while in the house.
I wondered where all the animals went in that picture.
Finally!
Something that will decoy the tornados away from mobile homes!
-- Terry
It is either all built up, or "protected" (parks, designated wildland, and whatnot). Try $3,000,000 USD per acre.
My nice little 2400 square foot house has a market value north of $700K, so, figuing a replacement cost at $150 square foot or so, that leave my tiny 4800 square foot lot at about $3M/acre.
Of course, it could all be a bubble in values... Is it really true that, at the peak, Tokyo land was priced more than the entire contenental USA? I think I read that in a Tom Clancy novel or some such, so I am not so sure, but sometimes things get crazy (cough) dot-com (cough), value-wise.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
As soon as I read the headline I knew there were wing nuts involved...
So, you're saying poor people with few possessions will stay in sturdy brick houses, whilst rich people with lots of expensive possessions will live in houses you can break into with an exacto knife?
Somehow I have my doubts :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Netcraft confirms it, concrete d0m3s are dead.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Anton is back in This ol' Box, this time handing out D.I.Y. lessons on making that all important extension for your cardboard house.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Seems to me I'd want to start off in a Wal-Mart tent and get a pile of material delivered from the local Home Depot and build a real house before living in cardboard - isn't that the material of choice for the homeless? Seems to me if you had the rights to erect a stucture on a plot of land, you'd want to have something with at least the illiusion of permanence to call your home.
Now that I look at the images... it doesn't look much bigger than a Wal-Mart tent $69.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This is no different than the skillion other "homes for poor people" sales pitches. So what? We already have habitat for humanity and they're in just about every community in the US. Fact is this is all about nothing but selling shit and putting more people in debt, because people in debt are going to be "more responsible" and feed the machine.
You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business. There are homes all over Euroupe, Asia, and the Mideast that have stood for hundreds of years and are made of nothing more than mud. Cob homes, in some parts of the world, are now becoming "fashionable" again and sought by well-to-do who want something with quality and character - attributes long lost to modern construction. But because building a cob home doesn't financially benefit anyone but the nearest dirt farm and an army of unskilled laborers, it's disallowed in just about any non-rural area in the US.
At the other end of the affordable/quality spectrum, you can buy a used trailer home in ths country for just a couple thousand dollars - but most local ordinances won't allow people to put these low cost homes on their own fucking property.
You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.
Hmm, well, there are millions of houses made from cardboard and other recycled goods. In Africa they are known as squatter camps, but in America they are known as trailer parks...
Oh well, what the hell...
Here's a site on that school that was built in England. http://www.cardboardschool.co.uk/
I think you'd be more enthused if it were a beer can house. You could use JOLT cans.
They make mobile homes look GOOD!
AT least we know we will still be able to have a house after they outsource all of our jobs! Let me have some of that cardboard!
This is my sig.
The best you can come up with is to call me a "troll" - for putting forth the heretical notion that people (OHMYFUCKINGAWD!) be allowed to do with their own goddamn property as they please?
Do those codes outlaw the sale of mobile homes in Florida? No? Well then it's obviously not about safety and insurability, but simply about impeding people's freedom to utilize resources as they see fit - ie it's all about selling more manufactured shit to keep the local businesses fat and happy.
To use the first example (and yours) a cob home capable of standing on its own would, in all likelihood (and based on other examples you can easily locate in google) weather a hurricane mch better than the sticks of wood we all saw strewn about on tv. Even if it completely lost its roof you would still have walls unless perhaps it was taken away by a tidal swell - and a stick home wouldn't do any better.
And to address the latter: if one CHOOSES to build a sub-code home, then it's going to be up to you to rebuild it when it gets blown away. Not the insurance company, not the goddamn federal government (which it presently does even with your precious building codes and all that insurance).
It's called freedom. Not freedom as in "free beer" but freedom as in "it's my property, my responsibility, and my fucking choice."
It looks funky and futuristic, but I can't imagine it being comfortable, and for $35,000? At that cost for a temporary structure, it's certainly not affordable for the homeless, and the ultra-rich go camping in better.
Still - with all that being said - I respect the ingenuity and environmental thoughfulness of the structure.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
You've got to be kidding me... Thirty thousand dollars for a stinking cardboard house? Thanks but no thanks... I'll stick with my 100k brick house. Seriously, since when did cardboard cost so much?
Believe me, its not about level of water. I had the misery of living in (pretty normal for student days) a very crappy apartment , basement of a victorian house in Bristol UK (6th largest city in UK).
When it is really bad you know because you are scrapping the mold off the carpet...
(This isn't news to anyone who was a university student in england).
Basements in many old buildings were where the servants used to live in victorian times. I'd guess that in those days because the houses were newer they weren't as bad as we saw them.
But nobody anticipated how long these buildings would be in use. (One friend of mine had a near death experience falling from an old balcony of such a building. Thankfully she missed the spikes that you see (I never have understood those)
Sadly, two years later she was the only survivor of another nightmare - this time on the motorway. Lots of decaying stuff in the uk, which is very scary).
I hope (20 yrs on) that she is making people enjoy the pleasures of good art... Gotta hope for something you know...
I'll pass.
--- Ban humanity.
Well, 54 now. But I'm not counting (save for the $15K I've put into it- or in that case, not saved).
I live in the snow region which, as of last year, had up to 3 foot deep snow ON MY ROOF. That the house occupies approximately 800 sq foot on the ground, thats about 3000 cubic feet of snow sitting above my head.
No offense to the posters of this article, but... That house is absolutely worthless in my region. But I'm sure that won't stop people from going on and on about how the US is a wasteful society and should model themselves after this... blah blah blah.
Parent is right. A house is a permanent structure and stays that way save for natural disaster, fire, or intentional destruction.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be wandering up onto the roof with another 400 lbs of salt soon- in preparation of the winter.
It's called "being homeless."
I don't get it.
As environmentally friendly and frankly quite cool as this seems, the current price of $35,000 AUS (~$27,000 USD) seems a little steep for the uses (temporary housing, travel home) they're marketing it for. For that price in the US, you can get a decent trailer or RV that doesn't need to be disassembled to transport and is less likely to get water seepage and mildew when it rains...
If you want true affordable environmentally-sound housing for the poor, the best bet is to go with something like architect Nader Khalili's Superadobe shelter designs. The shelters are made with sandbags reinforced with wire and filled with earth from the site. Not only do these not require costly deliveries of wood and cement products, they can be assembled in a matter of hours and can withstand wind, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. They also have a cool "hobbit-hole" type of feel...
Good skill to learn in the US for the time when all the IT workers get laid off... there'll be huge demand for them.
"Corrugated cardboard" is the proper term for the thick, stiff box material. "Corrugated" is an adjective. "Cardboard" is the noun.
Just because you say it so much that you're sick of saying the "cardboard", doesn't make it acceptable to do so outside of your little group of industry buddies.
However, it's perfectly acceptable to call corrugated cardboard just "cardboard." In standard English, that is an inclusive term.
Industry workers don't get to mangle the whole English language and then snobbishly "correct" the rest of the world, they just get to make up their own embarassing little variant they can get away among their own.
Seems like a great use for all those trees. Wait, aren't houses made of trees?
And I thought I was cool with an iPod case made from a milk jug. I think I just got schooled.
did you win a free ipod? build a case for it here
If it rains, you're cardboard is fucked.
Sounds like we should be marketing in full force personal energy sources -- solar, wind, etc. In fact, I think that making your own energy should be a top priority since for most of us on average only live in 1 or 2 houses in our lifetime. If we can make our own energy to sustain the house that we currently are living in now, that would be the "killer app."
Linux at home
It looks like the playhouse my mom built for me, same shape and everything.
I love the idea of housing like this (such as Yurts) but I grew up in a mobile home and I have a problem with living in a house that looks like a good stiff wind will hurl it toward Oz. I require a basement.
Cardboard and wing nuts. Somehow that reminds me of fish and barrels.
Only a bunch of wing nuts would build a house of cardboard, get it?
See what I've been reading.
We build houses every which way ...
We can build one for you
Sometimes we build em in a single day
Sometimes it takes two
(Chorus)
We don't use no building codes
and We don't do nothing wrong
We just pick up the tools
and make up the rules as we go along
For the fastest job yes-siree bob call 1800-heave
We got a hundred and six shortcut tricks up our sleave
When you're in a big hurry no time to worry 'bout building codes, yup
call barf construction, and we'll throw it up.
We're number one in affordable homes we build more new
'cause we go fourth class 'n then we pass the savings on to you
our walls are made of cardboard instead of wood
goes up faster than than two by fours; looks just as good
full lyrics here.
It seems too small to actually live in. From the photo it seems to be somewhere between the size of a large tent and a one-car garage. I can't see a person feeling at home in a place like this on a permanent basis (although it may be an alternative to renting a cabin when you go on vacation). Further, it would be _entirely_ too small to house a family, which is generally speaking where the market for housing is in the first place (people without families tend to get either apartments or condos).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What is it packed in?
Man, if they came with a raised floor (access floor) and a 100 or 200 amp 220 panel, you could have a cardboard backyard computer overflow data center, to house all of the machines that won't fit in the normaly house.
Or use it as a shed.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
They can be made by enterprising individuals and assembled in about the same timeframe as the cardboard house. I've even seen a picture of a complete yurt packed into the back of a pickup truck (no small "commercial truck" from TFA).
At one time I figured the price to do it on my own would be less than $5000 (US). At that price I figured I'd make three or four and have guest housing as well. I know wood is now more expensive, so I don't know if current DIY would be as cost effective as buying one from Pacific Yurts.
I think I'll stay with my refrigerator box.
IMHO, the parent poster made a VERY valid point - and folks like you are just seeking to toss it aside, with exceptions to the rule being argued as though they're the norm!
Sure, you probably don't want to see trailer parks pop up in the middle of Santa Fe, NM - but I don't think that's what the post was about at all.
Rather, I think he's trying to illustrate how thousands of ridiculous building codes for home construction contribute to pricing them out of the reach of folks who could otherwise build their own home with the help of friends and maybe a little non-union labor for the "hard parts".
As someone who barely scraped together the money to buy my first home 5 or 6 years ago - I know exactly what he means! I purchased a 50 year old place in a "so so" neighborhood by buying directly from the owner. In doing so, I got a very affordable price - but also a lot of work cut out for myself. Pipes were bad, and the kitchen badly needed remodeling. Lots of painting needed to be done too, and the driveway had to be torn out and repoured. Since I'm in an "unincorporated" area, at least the seller wasn't bound by a bunch of rules of things he *had* to fix before selling. Otherwise, he would have had to price the place high enough to cover all that work, and I wouldn't have been buying..... (EG. A couple windows had small cracks in them, which I got around to fixing a year or so after I moved in. If this place was one municipality over, the seller wouldn't have even been allowed to sell it like that.)
If you look at some of the building codes, you'll quickly realize that they ARE a conspiracy to ensure people hire licensed, union contactors for the jobs. Practically nobody else can navigate through the mess! Just with my own house repairs, I ran into at least 2 such situations.
1. A drainage pipe cracked just beneath the cement basement floor. I got a handyman to rip out the section of cast-iron pipe that broke, and he replaced it with PVC and put some cement patch around the base of the pipe where it met the floor. Later on, a union plumber informed me that my new PVC pipe didn't meet code and had to be torn out and redone! (It was perfectly fine, except the handyman used a piece of PVC with a Y split coming off of it because it was the only suitable piece he had easy access to at the time. He capped it off so it acted like a straight piece of pipe. But nope, code says you can't do that.)
2. An old sub-panel off my fuse box started going bad, so it kept blowing fuses when I tried to use my 220 volt electric dryer. The union electrician wanted BIG $'s to replace my entire panel with breakers and move the dryer over to that. For MUCH less money, I got a guy to simply replace the little sub panel with a new one with a single breaker inside it. Guess what, though? Despite that being a very suitable/workable solution, it's not "code" - because I didn't have a union electrician get permits and file paperwork in city hall stating he made changes to the electrical panel at my address. (This will probably become an issue if/when I go to sell my home to someone else - but until that time, I'm sticking with what I've got because it works great.)
This discussion has gone wildly beyond what I said. Feell free to take it wherever you like, but allow me to point out again I am not talking about contractors and hiring. If a person has the money to hire a bunch of contractors then they are not "poor" (Remember? This "cardboard house" was put forth as a means of making "affordable housing for the poor?")
If you are poor then your time is worth less than if you are wealthy. That ain't politically correct, but it's the truth - the more you are able to charge for your time, the less likely you are to be poor. Do the math.
Using found materials, self-manufactured or low cost materials (like cob, adobe, straw bales, etc) one can construct a home that is energy efficient and durable. Naysaying know-it-alls aside, there are thousands upon thousands of cob homes all over france, germany and england that have stood for hundreds of years (and thousands were made in germany post-WWII) - and what exactly is the difference between a "cheaply made" 400 year old mud house with (by necessity) two foot thick walls and an "expensive" 400 year old mud house with two foot thick walls? What about a mud house with two foot thick walls I construct with my friends and relatives? The cost is mud and labor, which cannot be dictated by those building codes. Ergo, such entrepreneurial approaches to home ownership are disallowed. Less competition means higher prices. And higher prices makes the neighbors (who already have their house) happy.
So, good luck getting permission to build a cob home in pretty much ANY area outside the most rural in the USA. And in many states (especially the trendy ones in the south and west), good luck getting permission to build a cob home - on your own land - even in the most rural location.
The objective is to get people into home ownership - call it "an investment in a committed relationship with a community" - without requiring the condescending approval of a bank or the yuppie neighbors. Contractors are not an avenue to doing this, because any licensed and even moderately successful contractor's time is going to be worth MORE than the time of the poor person who would be trying to hire them. Provide local workshops for training, and let the poor person DIY as much as he or she is able - even down to raw materials.
And I'm not just talking about mud - for example, this cardboard bit. You could likely pick up baled cardboard boxes for nothing from your local retailer (who just has to pay the recycler to haul them off) but can you secure "permission" to build a home from them? In most cases, no - it has to be cardboard that's been "blessed" by local government after being properly bribed by the corporate entity that "retouched" it. You can also construct bricks from recycled paper pulp and cement and sand - but will the local codes allow it? In most cases no, because your bricks would not have the required "blessing."
The whole point is that "DIY" bit. But, unlike computers, a home does not have to come from "raw materials" that can only be made using expensive and highly specialized equipment. I cannot take the mud and straw from my back yard and build a durable and energy efficient computer - but in most places, you can construct a home exactly this way. That is, you could if the codes would allow it.
35k seems rather steep.
"If you look at some of the building codes, you'll quickly realize that they ARE a conspiracy to ensure people hire licensed, union contactors for the jobs. Practically nobody else can navigate through the mess! Just with my own house repairs, I ran into at least 2 such situations."
Of course they can. There's an entire DIY industry based around that idea.
"(It was perfectly fine, except the handyman used a piece of PVC with a Y split coming off of it because it was the only suitable piece he had easy access to at the time. He capped it off so it acted like a straight piece of pipe. But nope, code says you can't do that.)"
Did you ever think that maybe that dead-end could act like a trap and eventually clog?
"Despite that being a very suitable/workable solution, it's not "code" - because I didn't have a union electrician get permits and file paperwork in city hall stating he made changes to the electrical panel at my address. (This will probably become an issue if/when I go to sell my home to someone else - but until that time, I'm sticking with what I've got because it works great.)"
This is for legal reasons. How does anyone know your "guy" knows what he's doing? Plus while your ultimately liable for your home. If you have insurance? It's their pockets that hurt people are going to go after.
Yes I know how hard it is to look outside one's sphere of experience, and understand why things are the way they are, and sometimes there is no good reason. But more times than not, there are.
What's wrong with those building codes?
In the first case, the code was probably a little too strict, though, if I were buying the house, I'd see the PVC as a negative against the house. Your repair guy should have done it right, even if it meant doing it twice. (The quick fix followed by the real fix.)
In the second case, the general rule is probably to replace old fuses with breaker boxes. That's the new code. If the quick fix works and is safe, that's fine. However, in the larger scheme, the codes help maintain standards of safety uniformly across houses. This makes it safer to buy a house for the average person.
BTW - you should have had the cheaper guy install breakers for all circuits.
My main gripe with codes is the cost of inspection. They can add up. I generally have relatively few gripes with the codes themselves, and they aren't that hard to understand or follow.
Out here, in Los Angeles, the cost of housing increases mainly due to lack of supply and growing demand. Permitting is a significant barrier to development that could alleviate shortages. Cities need to be able to give a firm "yes" or "no" decision that holds. Too often, they try to sneak development in on people, and residents object, causing snafus.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=122
We had a story a few years about a school built out of cardboard.
"few years ago about".
So, as a low-income home buyer with good (or virtually no) credit, I can either try to get a lender to GIVE me $35,000 for this, or I can go in on a traditional home mortgage.
Quite frankly, I'm not sold on it, and nor would any lender be. With a home, at least the lender: (a) sees that, barring something extraordinary, the home will appreciate in value over the life of the loan, and (b) the buyer will conceivably put EQUITY into the home, which tends to boost economic figures by either raw goods consumption or the use of craftsmen.
As a lender, if I saw someone wanting US$15,000, say, for this, I know that I'd not give it to them. A home like this, for good or bad, has only a tiny limited market for resale, IF it makes it that far down the road.
On a more personal note, I think this is the final thing we need in our realization of a negative utopia - to house the population in interchangeable quarters (we'll call 'em "barracks" while we're at it) that cannot really be sculpted, designed, or decorated to the taste of the individual (no hanging a picture in this home!). This seems like a BAD thing.
I'm not against housing everyone (in fact, I think that people deserve it), but anyone with a job and a bit of desire can go about looking into local lenders and programs that are accomodating to their situation, and go get something with a mailing address. This, it seems to me, helps the economy all 'round, while buying one of these units from TFA just acts as a big jar for rent money.
I thought geeks were, like, in a higher-payed part of the population. Why is it that bum housing interesting to slashdot readers? I mean, this one's not the first article about cardboard and the like houses on slashdot... Are we, like, anticipating post-post-post-y2k depression any time soon? I thought there were no more .com bubbles left to burst, at least for a good while...
A tip for living safely in a cardboard house: don't use the fireplace.
Now just a few more years
of global warming and England
will be dry enough to buy one
of these environmental house
thingys...
I see a lot of talk about how the house is environmentally friendly and low in cost, but don't see any data on how well this material insulates. Yeah, that's great that the house is recyclable and all, but it isn't exactly helping the environment if you have to compensate for a lack of insulative properties by cranking up the heat and air conditioning all the way to make it livable. I've read a lot of articles about landfill crises relating to old refridgerators, old computers and electronics, etc., but I've never heard of any kind of landfill crisis stemming from old housing materials. However, I have seen lots of concern over the high heating and air conditioning leading to environmental and cost problems. I just don't see this solving many problems, except perhaps for temporary housing situations like natural disaster relief, refugee camps, or housing troops in support of a military campaign or large exercise. It could really shine there, but for permanent housing it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
As for myself, I'm quite happy living in Germany where just about everything built after WW2 (hmm, most of the country) is made from reinforced concrete. I never turn on my heating until it is well below freezing outside. It's been pretty hot here the last couple of summers, but as long as it doesn't stay about 85F for several days it's quite comfortable without AC. It's much nicer than the cheap wood crap that we use in the US.
It's not only cheap but retarded when you compare it to possible competition: a 40 foot shipping container costs ~2000 USD as new. Add 6 inches of polyurethane insulation, interior paneling, a little electric wiring and basic ventilation for another ~2000 USD.
Will last forever and be as good in extreme cold as in extreme heat. Truckable, shippable.
Start surfing from http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/shippin
Building ordinances will mandate homes be made of cardboard in order to maintain the "character" of the area.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
the foam houses in Cory Doctorow's sci-fi.
Tyler: You don't know where ive been, Lou. YOU DONT KNOW WHERE IVE BEEN!!
Putting a sewage plant in a populated area would be one of those "public health" issues which we already covered while you (apparently) were not paying attention. Likewise would be that nuclear reactor you mentioned (we won't address the fact this is moot since there haven't been any new-clear reactors built in many, many years in the US). You didn't mention a hog farm either, but just to save you that trouble I'll point out we are again talking about an issue of public health here, which trumps "it's my land to do what I want." Public health always comes first. Likewise, if you want to live in an unheated cardboard box and freeze to death this winter, that's no one elses business until we have to haul away your rotting carcass (at which point we would, of course, bill your estate for the handling fees).
Anything else, if you got a problem with the way the neighbor keeps his place, buy him out. If the neighbors all agree with you then form an alliance, pool some resources, and pay him to get the hell out of there. Clean up the property, build a home however YOU want it to look and rent it out. Problem solved, and freedom and responsibility (what a novel fucking notion) is preserved for all parties involved. Buy out the whole block if you want, and lease it out only to those with the money to pay and the willingness to abide by the landowner's "community standards."
You want to preseve those artificially high property values on your block? Fine - then YOU bear the responsibility and the cost of doing so.
This is for legal reasons. How does anyone know your "guy" knows what he's doing? Plus while your ultimately liable for your home. If you have insurance? It's their pockets that hurt people are going to go after.
I certainly wasn't saying we should have no standards for licensing contractors. But that has little to do with my point, which is that individuals should have the freedom to be responsible for themselves without involving contractors. and they should have the freedom to decide if they even want to go with licensed contractors.
Want to hire a cheap unlicensed contractor to work on your home? Fine - good luck getting insurance. Want to do the work yourself? Do it and pay an inspector to certify it for you - then the insurance company can be ok. Don't want to do any of that? Then don't bitch when no one will insure you and your house burns down because you overloaded the electrical box.
Require inspections on all homes at time of transfer of ownership and publically posted reports; if it's about safety, then this alone would be more effective than those "codes." This keeps owners responsible for themselves and protects the market - WITHOUT granting "neighborhood associations" and local contractors what amounts to an old world Lordship over everyone's allegedly privately held estate.
actually.. we already have cardboard housing for students in 'utrecht' (city in the netherlands). this doesn't sounds like anything new?
Just to get the price conversions. That still isn't cheap, especially for something made of cardboard. You can buy decent quality single wides for around that much now. Trailers are not what they used to be as far as quality.
As far as Earthquakes, I bet that the card board is elastic enough to do quite well in one.
As far as fires, I don't care what fire retardent they dip it in, it's gonna burn and burn well.
As far as huricanes, well, the Wizard of Oz movie comes to mind. I bet it'd fly reall well.
I love how the man can remember a story from two years ago, but can't remember if the same post was made two hours ago... In the interest of not being modded a troll, I'd like to note that it seems like a great idea, except that it's, well, insufficiently closed for my personal needs... Where's the privacy? It seems like the sort of thing that a boyscout troop could collectively carry around and set up in the middle of nowhere for long-term shelter, if it had end walls.
Read jack phelps dot net
The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has some interesting designs using waterproofed paper tubes - they are really beautiful. See Paper Architecture, A Case Study: Cardboard Shelters, Kobe Earthquake January 1995, Time's Innovators article on him, and a Google Images search of his work
Homoownership? Isn't that illegal? :-)
Last I checked, areas that actually *are* that desperately poor (certain areas of Appalachia, for instance) don't really have that much in the way of building codes, from what I've seen. At least, if they do, they sure as hell aren't enforced.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Prefab is not the only cheap house-building technique. Damp-proof courses are not the only solution to rising damp. Eg:
- Cob (build walls with mud/straw/sand). Damp proofed by building a short "stem wall" of low permeability materials (eg: stone) and by the ability of cob walls to "breathe" and evaporate moisture rather than trapping it.
- Segal method. Wooden post-and-infill carefully pre-sized to use retail materials in whole uncut scheets. Ends up looking kind of like prefab, but the house stands some distance off the ground on wooden "stilts" rather than having a foundation. This makes it impossible for damp to rise.
The main disadvantage of all cheap housebuilding methods is that they're largely wall-building methods. Making roofs remains a hard problem, and the solutions (truss, ridge beam, insulate inside, insulate outside, etc) all suck for various reasons.
I wonder if they could test the same theory with say...some fruitcake? That stuff lasts forever and is relatively cheap too...
Not that it would help you, nobody's going to sell to a slime-based organism with goals of world domination.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
That isn't the end, though. Anyone who's using PETE films could add a layer of inflatable honeycomb (ships deflated) between two cardboard skins, and the user could inject foam into the honeycomb after assembly. Voila, insulated wall. This still does not give thermal mass to control temperature variations, but PETE holds water nicely; maybe water bladders in the walls? The more water you add, the more stable the structure becomes. Or make the bladders of a breathable fabric like Tyvek, and fill with mud; the mud dries to become thermal mass and acoustic barrier.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is a really neat way to make money out of the most miserable paupers in your country. Just take 'recycled' cardboard and make a cheap 'house' that is little more than a packing box.
We have many people in the United States that live this way. They are called variousely: "homeless", "bums", "hippies", "trash", "river-rats", etc. They live there because they can obtain no better. And now comes these 'engineers' that have 'found a way' to vacuum about $20K-Aus for that dubious priviledge. Oh yes, treat it with chemicals to get it a little stronger. Those substances are usually colloquially called 'glue'. Glue, over time, gives off its volatiles and becomes brittle. It then cracks and fails. Such failures could cause some spectacular collapses. Damn deadly too. The damage could mimic earthquake damage in Central America just a few short years ago when poor people living in unreinforced mud (adobe) houses had them collapse after heavy rains and a small quake. Those folks stored family 'accumulations' (junk) in their attics. When the houses liquified after being weakened by rain and finished off by quake, the occupants who were sleeping at the time were crushed like bugs.
Those houses would contain significant quantities of this glue. As it gives up its volatiles, significant quantities of fumes would build up in those 'houses'. It would be similar to types of cyanide gasses that build up in new trailer houses from the glue in the laminated paneling. All cyanides are poisonous, and the more soluble the cyanide, the deadlier it is. No matter where the cyanide radical ( -CN ) is on the molecule, there is a binary or ternary or even quaternary reaction from some substance in the environment, anticipated or not, that can release it in its more deadly forms. Then there is the Junior factor. You know Junior, the guy that nibbled on his crib and ate the old lead paint. Well me made lead paint illegal, stuffy old building coders and environment regulators that we are. Well Junior now has a WHOLE HOUSE to nibble on, and it will be more 'tender' too, especially after being soaked in saliva many times. OK we can and will paint the house. Now the paint will come off in jagged flakes when Junior eats paint, house, saliva, glue, cyanide and all.
Maybe a better solution to percieved housing shortage in the one country with the least population density in the world, the country that excludes all older people from its immigration lists, would be to utilize the upper stories in the downtown business areas of most any town from small to large. These are typically unoccupied in the United States, a hold over from when we lived in these places because we owned the store downstairs. Now they are usually occupied by ghosts. They are a silent and unutilized housing resource in the United States. I suspect this is true of Australia as well. Aussies should use this before packing people up in shipping crates and killing them slowly with cyanide while vacuuming their pockets of money from sweatshop jobs to pay crooked contractors, greedy swampland selling realtors and loan sharks.
In Korea, only the old live in cardboard houses.
About your situation with the PVC piping, that's sort of a necessary evil. It all really boils down to home insurance. The insurance company shouldn't be responsible for real hack-jobs (I'm not saying your plubming job is a hack job, think of hack job as an electrician putting a penny in an old-style fuse box to 'solve' the problem of a blowing fuse). Flooding is a very costly problem, and insurance companies have probably been burnt too many times by some contractors doing crappy jobs.
For insurance, there needs to be some adequate code that they can be sure your house meets, and that's why it exists. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to deal with. But that plumber was legally obligated to fix that 'violation', because if you did wind up with a leak and the insurance inspector saw that Y-piece, the union plumber would lose his job in an instant.
About your fusebox issue, here's a great counter-example. Suppose your handy-man 'fixed' the problem by just putting a penny in the fuse box (assuming you have the old screw-in fuses). If you had a fire because of that, the insurance company morally shouldn't be responsible for such a stupid 'fix'. So they require licensed electricians and all that paperwork. It's not even about merely money, but about safety too. You need to draw the line somewhere, and having a standard to comply with solves that problem.
Otherwise there'd be no way of knowing where along the gamut a contractor fixed something, between pure dangerous hack and working compliant fix.
I agree with you it's a pain in the ass, but I don't think it's a conspiracy at all. I believe it was formed for safety and insurance standards. Now that whole occupational fields are built around this system they want to preserve the status quo. But that's not the original intent.
make world, not war
Doesn't sound like a good idea at all. If you're expecting three feet of snow, how much salt do you need to apply? How would you re-apply salt once the roof gets snowed over? Having some snow on the roof isn't a bad thing so there's no reason to keep it completely clear. Salt water is corrosive and dried salt will continue to be corrosive. If you have metal rain gutters and downspouts then they may not still be intact by spring. If you get any ice damming that salt water will begin to corrode the roofing nails and the dried salt will continue to corrode the nails year-round, and because the nails are hidden you won't be able to see the damage until the shingles start to break free and fall off. All in all a far better solution is to have a roof structure that can support the snow load and remove any excessive snow mechanically (roof shovels).
Perfect for the West Bank and Gaza Strip!!
Salting is probably the worst thing you can do to a roof- only use CaCl2 (but NaCl sticks around longer yet destroys shingles faster).
:)
The primary thing for salt is to get rid of ice rapidly. And god does it work fast. I hired a roofer that ripped me and a neighbor off - we're out about 2500$ between the two of us. The salt takes care of a region that floods down into the house... destroyed my brand new kitchen ceiling and the garage, basement, floor, etc....
This year I try decicing cables
I shovel off the snow each year, but I figured the effort to carry up 400lbs of salt is probably best expended before the ladder is covered in ice...
Ok, perhaps "conspiracy" was a bit too harsh a word (or at least, not the best choice of wording)... but I think my general point still stands.
When you refer to the "whole DIY industry based around" the idea of building codes, I'm not quite sure I follow? What I've run across myself is quite a few DIY type books and videos on the market that give just enough general info to make someone confident enough they can tackle their own issue to dive in and give it a shot. What they *don't* usually do is detail all of the "gotchas" one might encounter during the project, and all of the building codes that might apply.
I know when I remodeled our bathroom, I really felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants, despite having Home Depot's guide to home improvement and some info I found on web sites about redoing bathroom tile, etc. I made quite a few decisions based solely on advice of a buddy who does carpentry and home remodeling projects for a living - but couldn't find much documentation to back up his recommendations. (EG. He told me to be sure to use "green board" to replace walls we knocked out when we got rid of the old tile. My books and guides never said anything about this. I would have just gone with regular drywall if he hadn't mentioned it to me. Is that "code"? Dunno... Could be, since green board is supposed to be much more moisture-proof, but I couldn't figure out for sure.)
As for my PVC pipe with the Y split coming off of it, yes - it did occur to me that the reason "code" didn't allow it is fear it would become a trap and clog. But the Y split points up at a 45 deg. angle.. not down... So logically, I'd think anything causing that to clog the pipe would have clogged a straight section of pipe too. The water is flowing down the pipe.
When it comes to electrical wiring, it's really not rocket science. It's either right or it's wrong, IMHO. Clearly, a penny in a fuse box is a "hack" and completely bypasses a safety measure. To me, that's nowhere near the same as having a non-licensed handyman swap out an old, failing fuse sub-box with something comparable, except new with a breaker in it. You're talking about what, 3 wires (common, neutral and ground) being switched out from old box to new? The biggest safety risk I'd see is the handyman electrocuting himself because he didn't take proper precautions - and frankly, that's entirely *his* problem, not mine. If he offers to do that job, I assume he knows how to perform the task safely.
There is something called the "Golden Mean" which is common to many things in the natural world, for instance nautilus shells, or the slope of sand dunes (33 degrees). I don't know if it applies to snow, since snow has a greater "stickiness"...but even if the slope is more like 45 or 50 degrees, there is just no way that the house portrayed on the link could accumulate snow on its roof (a 60 degree slope minimum!). If you are shoveling 3 feet of snow off your roof every winter, then you were suckered into a buying a house that wasn't designed for your climate.