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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.
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?
That's how I read it when you say things like that.
You can't take the sky from me...
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!
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.
So that $5,000 I pay to get to live anywhere -- does that include the land its on? Didn't think so. The real costs of home ownership are property. And how'd a throwaway house become the enviromental solution? Yeah it was recycled once, but how's it better than a house that's built, and endures for decades?
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
No, that's a symptom of a tangential problem: give people something, and they don't value it. Easy come, easy go.
The Aussie A-frame fills a niche like the mobile home: a cheap place to buy. Trailer parks are seedy and crimeful too, but nothing like Cabrini Green was.
sigs, as if you care.
I live in CA, so expect these houses to fold as soon as a quake hits. And heaven help you if you build one in a hurricane or tornado area. Or anywhere that has heavy rain or snow. So basically you can build them in the Sahara.
Philosophy.
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.
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.
"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.
Amen.
I think the key here is the "responsibility" issue. Just because you don't have a government agency looking out for you doesn't mean that we are gonna have thousands of people handing over money without thinking. The reason slum lords can get away with what they get away with, is because people have come to expect something from houses. They expect the government agency, and it's rules, to be able to prevent them from getting ripped off. They know of the existence of this agency, and of it's rules (how could you NOT, with how restrictive they can be) and they say "Well, if my buddy had so many problems with that upgrade that even I thought to be fairly safe because it wasn't up to code, it must be nearly impossible to get away with anything genuinely unsafe, or poor in quality." They are re-assured by the fact that this government agency "runs things". If you did away with this government agency, all of a sudden, the responsibility of checking up on a house that you bought/rented would fall solely on YOU. You're the one investing the money in it, therefore, it would be in YOUR best interests to check it out, get a friend to check it out, hire a local handyman to check it out etc.
I think the problem is that people are scared of the responsibility. When they have this big government body reassuring them that they will be okay, they feel totally abdicated of any responsiblity. They get fucked, and it's not THEIR problem, they can just shift the blame over to someone else.
You want to talk about thousands of deaths from houses that wouldn't survive an earthquake? Gee, living in a house that isn't earthquake proof in an earthquake prone area? Hmmm... Called survival of the fittest last time i checked. If you want to argue that millions of idiots would go out and buy lethal/unsafe houses if we didn't have a government agency, then sure, i'll say that might even be true. Does that mean we need to pat these idiots on the head, and lead them off in the direction of something safe? Not necessarily. I think we should leave these idiots to their own devices, and 20-40 years down the road, we might have a slightly higher quality of gene pool.
Government agencies don't need to tell smart people what to do, they tell stupid people what NOT to do.
Unless you live in a very sparsely populated area, no land owner has a right to "do as they please" with the land. There's zoning and community feedback. The more crowded it gets, the more these forces increase. Yet, at the same time, these forces also raise the value of the property. Mainly, it's because there's a lot of economic value in being very close to other people.
Get away from the cities, and your "freedom" increases. Get far enough away, and you can grow marijuana and cook meth without getting hassled.
As for cob houses -- well, it's a unique exception. You'd probably have more luck building it out in the tules. On the other hand, you can probably get away with cinderblock and rebar walls. Those would withstand hurricaines, and are certainly in any American city's codes.
If there's precedent for building with earth, maybe you could lobby your local city to adopt another city's codes, and issue you a variance.