House Redesign

So here is my original plan for my house. It's a straw bale house design. Straw bales have about an R-50 insulating value and can support your roof if you "float" your top plate on top of your bales. Bales cost $1 to $3 a bale depending on the deal you get. That means a my 600 square foot house would cost $200 to $600 dollars for the straw in the walls. This is not a bad cost at all. That being said, I have run across a cheaper way to build.

My parents decided to build a raised garden using used tires. You can either go with the tire vase design that requires a rim, or you can stack 4 tires on top of each other after cutting the side wall out of one side. Used tires are free. We went to our local Les Schwab dealer and asked if they had any used tires we could have. They seem real happy to point us to their semi trailer full of used tires and said go ahead. It could have something to do with the fact that the US produces about 200 million used tires a year and it costs them money to get rid of them.

A Google search on tire houses will lead you to an organization called Earthships. Earthships appears to be a band of old Hippies that seam to worship the Earth a bit much for my taste, but they are not without their usefullness. Their designs tend to be on the ugly side when they start building with bottles. They stack their tires like bricks, pack them with dirt, and insert a soda can in the void on the side in between each tire. If you have clay in your soil, that will probably work. The dirt I have is more like the Anti-Clay. My soil will not pack and stick together when it dries. When it dries out it runs almost like water.

This stack is stacked like I saw in the tire trailer. This stack has a higher tire density and lacks the void the other method has. The botom row looks like it may be slightly less stable, but that can be worked out. Earthships tend to be build on hilsides. I don't have a hillside. So, I'm going to build using most of the same techniques as I would with strawbale construction. The downside is that I've discovered that the end of tire walls have some issues. this will crop up any time I try to make a corner in my wall.

To get rid of this problem, I have decided to make my house round. This introduces several engineering problems, and I've only solved some of them, but I've made my descision. I will still use 30 hay bales for key locations, but the rest will end up being tires packed with dirt. I've mapped out the location of the sink drain, so I can still work out the drywell step I am working on right now. There are a few other things I have to figure out before I pour concrete, but the drains are all I have to work on right now.

Side note: Google Chrome does not have spell check.