natural building

while this house incorporates something as far from natural as shipping containers, we also will incorporate techniques such as straw bale infill walls, natural plasters and some natural tree trunks as beams and support for the stair case. But, that will be next summer, when we start the job up again. The last thing that we did was return to the site in Dec. to get an inspection on the rough plumbing and the placement and welding of the containers so that we could get another 180 day stretch of time on our building permit. So now we are good till sometime in June. Really, the permit is good for 4 years, but they want to avoid having jobs abandoned, so they put the stipulation of building activity (needing an inspection), every 180 days. It doesn't make sense that anyone who has spent as much effort on the project as we have would abandon it, but that is the requirement.

More natural building

Here are couple more photos of some of the natural buildings we were around or worked on while in Tlaxcala. One is of a staircase using a juniper tree trunk, and the other is of an adobe wall, with decorative natutral earthen plaster (which, when it includes some of the sap from a cactus pad and is polished, reamains quite water proof).

We also went to visit David Laws, who lives at the end of the Mississippi neighborhood and is trained as in classical Japanese carpentry and joinery. We visited his shop and a job that he is doing in Vancouver, and we saw some very fine, elegant work in the traditional Japanese style. If anyone would like something done in that style, from garden house to a whole house, he is the man to talk to

natural building in Mexico

We haven't posted anything lately because the weather here is not conducive to working on the project, and also because we were in Mexico working at a project we support there. It involves reforestation and also classes in natural building. We are including some photos of some of the buildings there and hope that they will be of interest to some of you.

This is an old adobe house that is being rebuilt with various techniques, including cob and straw bale as well as adobe.

What you are looking at here is an adobe floor, finished with linseed oil and beeswax.

speaking of walls

Since I mentioned walls, if might be interesting to mention here that we are planning on covering one wall of the lower 20 footer with either adobe blocks (if we can get them made) or else cob (one step less). This will be an interior wall that will act as a trombe wall or heat storage unit. It will be partly in the glassed-in entry and partly in the living room area which will also receive a lot of light. The hope is that at least some of the time in the cooler months, it will receive enough sunlight to warm it up and then it will transmit it's warmth back, both into the living room space as well as the bedroom which shares that common wall. In addition we plan to put a wood stove against that wall, perhaps with a coil on it, which we would use to circulate hot water through the lower part of the wall. That would allow the wall to absorb the radiant heat from the stove as well as the conduction heat from the hot water. We'll see how all of this works out.

Things to consider

Many people have asked us how we are going to finish the walls, which does present several options. To begin with, you must remember that in the price of the container there comes a complete structural framing system, which will stand alone. Therefore, with any wall treatment or finish that you may consider, you should also think about whether or not it would require "furring out"or not in order to be able to apply that treatment. If you must, then you may be using the same amount of lumber that you would use in a conventional framing system, thereby negating any savings that may be afforded by the container's structure. In addition you must also consider electrical wiring and placement of plug-ins and switches. Therefore, you might simply paint an interior wall, which costs nothing extra, really. Or you might apply an earthen plaster, or a lime based plaster, which might require you to provide some sort of attachment points, such as some screwed on tabs, or just screw tips, or some attached chicken wire, etc., again, a thing that you would probably have to do in a conventional setting.
If you wanted to apply for example, wainscoting, you could screw on a couple of 1x4 strips to attach to, and the same would go for Sheetrock - both of these being some additional input, but minimal. Adhesive could be used, but it might involve an input that could be toxic, depending on the type of glue.
Those are just some of the the thoughts that we have had as we have considered what we will do with the container walls that are exposed inside the house. I say that because some will be covered by kitchen cabinets, and some with bookshelves, and some with adobe, and some (in the bathroom) being necessarily built as dividers, or plumbing walls, thereby substantially reducing the number of walls to be finished.
Enough for now. Exterior walls require other ideas.

container details

It occurs to me that someone might be interested in a few more details about containers. For example, they come in two standard sizes, 20ft long and 40ft long, plus what are known as high cube containers whose inside height dimension is about a foot greater than that of a standard, which is about 7ft 10in. You can also obtain what are known as garment containers, that have only had garments shipped in them, hence they are extremely clean and have never had anything that might be considered toxic, such as an oil product, shipped in them.
All of them have a floor made of a very hard 1 & 1/8th in. plywood, screwed to steel joists that are on 12in spacing. The 20's are the most in demand (I think because the military uses them), and they therefore command a price only slightly lower than that of a 40 footer.
There are more factoids stored in my brain if you are interested.

crawl space

Thinking about the plumbing, it fits here to mention the lack of a large crawl space under the house. This will be what our engineer called a conditioned space, which means that it will have no air exchange and be sealed off, thereby allowing the air temperature in the space to slowly arrive at the same ambient temperature as that of the interior of the house. This means that it is more difficult to deal with anything that must pass under the house such as plumbing, and all such issues must be thought out and dealt with early on. The alternative would be a standard stem wall with a standard crawl space. That would use more concrete, but facilitate the resolution of other things such as plumbing.

Some rough plumbing

As we got a couple of dry days again, we decided to try to get the rough drain plumbing under the floor of the container and into the space that will be the bath. We wanted to do it in the dry because it means me (Fred) laying on my back in the dirt partially under the container to connect everything. Not an activity for rain and mud. Also, if we do it now, we are that much farther along when we need to pour the slab and work on the bath.

About the bath: we had originally planned on 2 baths, one up and one down, but the height or level of the septic tank relative to the floor level of the containers ended up making it impossible to get the drains under the far (20ft) container where the bath would go. The long and short is that we decided to move the bath and only have one, on the ground floor, which we like a whole lot better, is much simpler, and allows the possibility of having the hot water heater quite near both the bath and the kitchen.

grounding

We visited an electrical contractor to check on any oddities that we might need to be on the watch for. He said (as I suspected) that the thing will be quite well grounded since it is all welded together and welded to the plates that are set into the concrete piers that serve as a foundation. He did say that we are required to have a ufer ground anyplace that we have a continuous foundation, which would mean the kitchen/living area where there will be a slab. But it is simply a 20 foot piece of #4 re-bar that extends up out of the footing that you can tie into the panel, to connect the whole thing together. Quite simple, really.

lumber and humidity

As you might imagine, if you load a bunch of lumber into a water tight container like we have done, there will be a certain amount of moisture given off, with no place to go. Anticipating that, we bought a dehumidifier and 250 ft of 12-2g wire (which we will later use to wire the house) and connected the "cord" to the power at the well house. Sure enough, the marvelous machine began to suck water out of the air at a great rate. We hope that over time the lumber will dry out nicely.

Rainy Fall

With the weather turning cold and damp we are now going to take advantage of one aspect of the containers: the instant storage they offer. Since prices in the construction industry are as soft now as they have been in a while, we are going to load them with lumber, windows and cabinets so that we have what we need to continue the project next summer.

I guess, however, that we won't try to load anything into the upper container. I don't think our old muscles will quite be up to the task.

One piece of advice. Don't bother to mix 26 sacks of premix by hand if you can help it.

Since the sun is still shining, we got a 10 inch fir log from the neighbor and peeled it so that we could use it for a support column under the corner of the upper 20 footer. We debarked it with a draw knife and a broad axe.

Then we stood the post over a vertical steel plate with 2 holes in it, and secured it with 10 inch bolts.

After a few days wait the self loading log truck arrived to position the containers. It had a 15,000 lb capacity, but that is when the arm is close to the truck. Therefore it was necessary to move the big one one end at a time (it weighs about 8,500 lbs).

The smaller ones (4800 lbs) could be moved in one swing. Here the last one is being positioned up on top of the two others, where it will be welded in place. It will then need a support column underneith the corner, so we put in some temporaries with jacks to hold it in the meanwhile.

Then, things started moving faster. Three days after the pour, with good weather, the first

container arrived, that one being a 40 footer.

The containers were delivered on a special trailer that had an axel that could move forward or back a total of 15ft., as well as a chain winch to offload the containers. It was quite slick.

Then the ready-mix truck arrived and after some attempts, the driver told us the obvious - it was wet and he couldn't back up to the place of the pour.

Fortunately several friends had arrived to attend the festivities, so we all jumped in and did it with wheelbarrows.

Here you can see the end of the 12in. culvert that will bring in air to the vegetable cooler from the shaded gully.

moving along

So, after receiving the permit, the forms for the pads that would hold the containers went in. That's Pam checking the plans.

HarlanHouse

This is the story of the complete process we are going through to build a small house on a rural 3।1acre property in Harlan, Oregon, a one time sawmill town that has been without a mill for many years. Except for a few residences, all the land here is either zoned agricultural or timber conservation ( the former mill site being industrial). That zoning implies certain restrictions regarding building a residence, and it was necessary to go through a lengthy process to obtain a ?? variance?? to then be able to apply for a septic permit and a building permit. Another aspect to this process was the clean-up of the property which was covered in blackberry vines, scotch broom and junk, which was the residue of many years of habitation, first as saw mill housing and later on (after the mill closure) as a site for various mobile homes and trailers। All of this culminated (after complaints, etc.) in a court proceeding where in the occupants were ordered to remidy the inadequate septic system and remove the illegal trailers, and eventually the county took possession of the property. The property remained that way for some years until we acquired it and it decided to clean it up to make it useful. When we began the clean-up process we encountered the two derelict mobile homes, a 24 ft. travel trailer, a horse trailer, a large delivery van 35 tires and wheels, old lawn mowers, logging cables and other kinds of metal objects, and lots of buried garbage, most of these items being covered by the berries and scotch broom. Regarding the mobile homes, we did a lot of research to try to find a way to recycle them, but nothing proved to be workable. We read about projects in other states where mobile homes and loaders and dump trucks and labor had been donated, and even in those cases it did not turn out to be economically worthwhile. To be sure, Pam and I could have spent the entire summer stripping out the two homes by hand and making multiple trips to the land fill with the mounds of garbage that was inside them and that would have resulted from the process, but the prospect of receiving $400 to $500 per trailer after all the work was not sufficiently rewarding. Neither would it have dealt with the tires, cable, lawn mowers, garbage, etc. Sooooo in the end we hired a contractor with a big excavator and he removed 240 cubic yards of material and it all went to the landfill in large drop boxes. And we are still picking up bits of scrap metal, broken glass, garbage bags, piping, etc. - another pickup load so far.