The house that Joel and Barb Mielke built for their retirement is located in rural Preston, MN. Large windows open to a view of acres of prairie. It has wood and stone detailing. When they designed their dream home, they wanted it to break even on electricity and after installing solar panels to create energy … Read more
Phillip Freiberg sent me some photos of a small house he visited in Thailand. The house cost less than $1000. The clay was from the back yard mixed with rice hulls. It is cool in the heat. It was built 10 years ago by someone for his father.
Around 1997, when my wife and I first came to Crestone, Colorado, there was a buzz going around town about an amazing new building material that its inventor, Mike McCain, called “fibrous cement,” but that has become more widely known as “papercrete.” Mike, with his tremendous enthusiasm, was generating interest in the wonders of his … Read more
Using the sun to heat your house has got to be the most economical and ecologically benign way to keep comfortable when the temperatures drop. There are a number of common strategies for doing this. My favorite method is passive solar design, where there are no “active” fans or pumps to contend with. Most passive … Read more
About 15 years ago I built the “Carriage House” using a prefabricated steel vault as a supporting structure for earthbags filled with scoria as insulation. It is a two story affair, with the lower one being a garage/shop and the upper one an office and storage space. I located a new 34′ X 16′ steel … Read more
Few things give me more pleasure than living among green plants, especially when they are edible. If you couple this with the possibility of helping to heat your house, you can readily see why people become attached to their attached greenhouses. I have built several of them, with different materials and designs, but the basic … Read more