Comments on: Don’t Try This Recycling Trick at Home!

By: Bill Smith

Bill Smith — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:35:57 +0000

This looks a bit like a
This looks a bit like a chicken coop I made from odds and ends when I was a kid. I just now realized that if I had put more glass in mine I could have gone directly to roast chicken.

By: Allison Bailes

Allison Bailes — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 18:33:16 +0000

Stephen M.
Stephen M.: That could well be a concern. Looking at it from the outside, it seems that all those windows may just be nailed to each other, but if you click through to the Inhabitat article, you'll see some decent sized lumber backing them.

Leigha D.: Excellent points. I hate throwing stuff away, but as you state so clearly, sometimes trying to save every little scrap leads to problems.

John P.: Sorry to be such a downer, dude. ;~)

Roxanne: Thanks!

Cameron T.: Yep. Physics rules. Structural engineers do fill a valuable role.

By: Cameron Taylor

Cameron Taylor — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 18:25:30 +0000

Oh boy does this bring back
Oh boy does this bring back memories when I was involved in a "back to the land" community of earth sheltered housing late 70's/early 80's. We thought we had it all figured out: make a building shell out of ferrocement (with the idea you could do it yourself in stages), slap some sealant and insulation on it, leave enough openings for naturual light, cover the whole shebang with dirt...Mother Earth News paradise!

Looking back, I'm glad I got no further than gouging a big hole into a gently sloping hillside in order to build my dream dome home. A neighbor down the way went all the way, put dirt on top, and was shocked when his supposed "monolithic shell" cracked in a dozen or more places. Turns out that throwing mud onto a rebar and e-lath shell in various stages (i.e. different days) leaves a ton of cold joints and anything but a monolithic structure. It was an object lesson for me; that pie-in-the-sky dreams don't always translate well to the harsh world of physics. What I did not fully grasp in those days is how it was laying a foundation for my ever evolving understanding of good building science.

By: Leigha Dickens

Leigha Dickens — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 16:48:53 +0000

You know, I think about the
You know, I think about the pros and cons of salvage a lot, because in our panelizing plant we are trying to be zero-landfill and that means trying to find homes for the buildng materials we have left over that can't get recycled. Things like sizeable house wrap scraps or sizeable XPS scraps...on the one hand, someone can surely USE those! On the other hand, if somebody used those, they'll end up having lots of seams that have to be properly taped, lapped, flashed, etc, and having all of those seams will probably negatively impact the building performance even if somebody does take the time to do them correctly. Perhaps I should contact these folks and see if they could use some scrap XPS to insulte their walls. Surely, surely this house was an "under the radar" house, not something that a building inspector ever laid eyes on.

As a young hippie myself, I get it though. Some of my young hippie friends recently built a "dirt bag" house (read, an earth-ship style house with bags of dirt as the bricks) under-the-radar out on the outsirks of town, and a piece of me wanted to join them. Rather than expect the house to be comfortable, temperature-wise, it's more like hey we're living closer to nature and not trying to keep our environment in a strict temperature range. What a great environmentalist ideal.

The problem with that is that most people aren't willing to do that forever, but just for a while. And then your salvage built house becomes...more salvage. At least it is salvage you learn something from for a while.

By: Stephen Morrison

Stephen Morrison — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 14:22:56 +0000

I would not want to be
I would not want to be sitting there, in a strong wind, when all that glass comes falling down!