After finishing the chicken coop described in yesterday’s post it was time to start work on the pantry/root cellar portion of the complex. I hired an excavator to dig out part of the hole and give me a head start on the project. While he was here with the machinery he also leveled an area for the rest of the building, dug an extension of the water line so we would have water next to the chicken coop, and brought in road base for inside the barn.
My latest building project, that I have been working on for several months, is a large multipurpose construction, combining elements of a barn, garage, chicken coop, recessed pantry, and mud room entryway. Actually, the chicken coop was finished about year ago, but was planned to be part of the whole affair. I would like to tell you about all of this, but maybe I’ll start with the chicken coop.
The blog post the other day about Steve’s Dome in Thailand has caused quite a stir. Read the Comments there to get the background story. Here’s a follow-up report about what’s been happening since. The images of Steve’s home are spreading across the net very fast…borderline viral. This confirms my initial opinion that this home is worth taking a closer look at because it is so exceptional. (See his photo galleries here and here. However, I’m taking some flak for my decision to publish a home built with concrete (reader requested, by the way). This was the first and only time I’ve done this, but in this case I felt the home was exceptional enough and had many interesting features that could be used in houses made of sustainable materials. In other words, we can learn from studying homes built with all types of materials. This was all clearly explained in the original blog post.
The ”Maison Feuillette” was built in 1921 by Feuillette, an engineer who was looking for solutions to construction problems. It has been for sale for one year. The house (still inhabited and perfectly preserved) is acknowledged globally as a unique, innovative and exemplary building. It features a timber frame structure with straw bale infill, modular construction, and the use of local materials.
The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information. I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more
Three beautiful thatched roof houses just for fun.