In addition to profiling my 25 most popular house plans, my new house plan book ’25 Small Sustainable House Plans’ also includes 3D drawings and construction details on how to build 20 features for sustainable home such as lofts, porches, alternative roofs, low cost floors, how to add on to an earthbag house, how to build with pallets and roundwood poles, and much more.
house design
Tiny House Nation
Now there’s a show devoted just to tiny homes.
Huff ‘n’ Puff’s golden rules for designing and building your strawbale home
Huff ‘n’ Puff’s golden rules for designing and building your strawbale home:
1. Practice on a test wall before you build.
2. Keep your buildings small.
3. Do not design a two-storey home.
4. Inspect your bales at source before you buy and have them delivered the day before you commence the wall raising.
Bamboo Mat Design Options
There are many different uses for bamboo mat such as wall treatments, ceilings, floor mats, placemats, furniture and cabinet door panels. The natural textures and hues add a special touch to a home. Millions of low cost homes in the tropics use bamboo mat as the main covering over lightweight wall framing. The image above shows just a few available designs. Check your local suppliers or order online.
Home Design Sample Boards
Before you build your dream home it’s good to start collecting images and samples to help visualize and coordinate the final design. Not only is this a lot of fun, it can greatly improve the results and help you communicate your ideas to workers and family members. The basic idea is closely related to making scale models. Hands-on, tactile activities like this can open your mind to lots of new possibilities.
Mud House Design 2014 Competition
Reinventing the African Mud Hut Together
Nka Foundation invites entries for Mud House Design 2014, an international architecture competition open to recent graduates and students of architecture, design and others from around the world who think earth architecture can be beautiful. The challenge is to design a single-family unit of about 30 x 40 feet (approximately 10 x 12 metres) to be built by maximum use of earth and local labor in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.
This is the design problem: In Ghana, as in other countries in West Africa, stereotypes about buildings made of earth persist because of poor construction. From the cities to the low-income villages, use of concrete – despite its dependence on imported resources – is considered indispensable for building. Yet an excellent, cheap and local alternative called laterite, red earth, is available everywhere in Ghana. The long-term goal is to enable the Ghanaian population and lots of other places, to overcome the stigma that mud architecture is architecture for the very poor.
Nka Foundation Announces Jury Members for MUD HOUSE DESIGN 2014 competition for Ghana. The jury consists of pre-selection jurors and grand jurors. The Pre-Selection Jury will review all design entries and select the overall Top 20 Designs and presented them to the Grand Jury, who will then select the winning designs. The Jury session runs from September 15 – September 30, 2014. Those interested in participating in the competition can still register on https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mud-house-design-competition-tickets-10697036123 till August 15, 2014.