Economic Planning While Under a Failing Economic System

There are a lot of talking heads telling you where the economy is going these days. Many will listen to the ones telling them what they want to hear. If you want something else, if you want someone that has no vested interest in your liking what he has to say, no monetary incentive to lie, and a reasonably good track record, I believe the guy over at Vision Victory manifesto.com has a better grasp on what's going on than anything any of the network TV news has to say. The essence is: The economy is screwed. Don't make money based plans for more than about 10 to 15 years, because the value of US dollar will have tanked by then and enough economic chaos and change will have happened by then that you'll have to make new plans based on whatever economic system reconstitutes after the crash.

He and I share similar plans for the next 10 to 15 years, but there are differences. Here would be my recommended plan by order of importance:

#1: God. Religion is a controversial subject. Many don't believe in God. Regardless of this, I will unapologetically tell you that if you don't have Him on your side, every other thing you are doing is futile. Getting him on your side requires that you do your own homework. Don't assume that conventional wisdom is going to get the job done.

#2: Skills. Develop skill sets that make you a vital organ to society. Luxury items and skills intrinsic to them are the first to become useless.

#3: Basics. Warm Dry Shelter. Clean Water. Food. Work toward obtaining a low maintenance, energy efficient house on two to five acres of land that can be developed in to farm land. Learn to farm. Learn to harvest wild foods. If you can grow food, if you can walk into the wild and find shelter, water, and food with your bare hands or with simple tools, you will have an edge over the vast majority of people that in habit the US today. It's a simple skill you can develop now that nobody else is learning.

#4: Tools. Tools for building, tools for fixing, tools for your skill sets, these are obvious. Guns and knives may not be obvious to you. They are usually seen as weapon, not tools. While they can be weapons, and some are good for little else, the type of gun or knife you buy makes a difference. If you buy an assault riffle and a sword, you are pretty mush stuck with them being weapons. A K-bar and shotgun, on the other hand, are much better suited to being tools. There are a number of things that can be made with just a good hunting/ camping knife, and a shotgun can be used for both hunting and for shooting animals that would eat your livestock or crops. Think utilitarian, not commando and become familiar with your tools.

#5: People. Surround yourself with level headed like minded people that are pursuing a similar plan that can be trusted. The hive effect is a very potent force to be reckoned with. Make it work for you, not against you.

#6: Stockpile. A stockpile of food, water, ammunition, and other consumables is impervious to inflation, but not time, so don't go crazy. Ask yourself: What are the chances of you having to move it without a car? Will it rot before you can use it? Can you stand eating the food you are stocking? Is their enough variety in your stockpile to keep you healthy? Can the ammunition be used to do what you need it to do? More than a year's supply is probably excessive. After a year, you really need to have a developed an income strategy that doesn't rely on your stockpile. If you haven't, you are in a type of trouble no stockpile in the world is big enough to fix.

#7: Investing. So, you you have a small farm with a reliable well that is paid off. It has an energy efficient house on it that can operate off the electrical grid. You have it packed with a variety of canned foods. Enough to last you and your family for a year. You have a couple of utilitarian guns and you practice with them weekly. Yet you still have income you wish to invest. What do you do with it? Gold and silver are (mostly) inert minerals. As such, their long term real value is reasonably stable just like the ground is reasonably stable. The reason the price of gold has been rising for years is because the dollar has been loosing its real value to inflation. Gold and silver have had a significant value for several thousands of years. The bad news is that in a very small, primitive, crisis economy, gold and silver is frequently valueless for the obvious reasons. You can't eat it, you can't burn it, they're just an inert minerals. Energy on the other hand is always useful, though stored energy is more difficult to store and move. The nature of the stored energy you invest will matter a great deal in a crashed economy. Flammable gases require special containers and special equipment to store and use. Liquid fuels are more stable, but still require containers and some, like gasoline, have additives that will separate and foul the fuel, but with some effort they can still be used in machinery. Solid fuels don't serve well in machinery, but are the most stable and the easiest to store and use. Fire wood must be kept dry or it will rot. Coal it hated by environmentalists, but it is probably the most perfect fuel to stockpile. It is impervious to everything but fire, it won't leak or rot if you just dump it on the ground or bury it in a hole. It will sit around a wait for you longer than you will ever need it too. Governments and thieves will break in and steal gold and silver, but when was the last time you ever heard of someone breaking in and stealing coal? Sure it happens, but it's a much more difficult and desperate act. You will need a place to store it all though, and the amount of space it will take per dollar of investment will be much larger than gold or silver, and reconverting coal into cash could be an unreliable process. Moving your stockpile will be harder as well. Still, I would be far more comfortable stockpiling coal than gold.

First Snow and the Were-Llama Flu

The first snow has arrived today. It's not catastrophic, but it is on the early side and it's sticking. Snow tires aren't legal for another 3 days. Fortunately the snow is supposed to turn to rain by tonight. I'll be staying to let people re-learn how to drive in the snow. Still, I predict that El Nino will make this a warm and dry winter.

The flu has hit here again, but after 2 weeks, I think I may be getting better. I'm dubbing it the Were-Llama Flu.

The Ugly Sumer of 2009

Well it's become apparent that finances will not allow me to build even the foundation of my house this year. It just as well though, as I have decided to re-engineer the foundation to do double duty. I'll write more about that later.

The good news is my new business has be gun to transform holes in the ground into swimming pools. If it continues to bring me some work, then I may just have the money to lay that foundation come Spring. In the mean time, I will begin sharing images and tips on how we have built the current straw bale buildings and other useful projects we have going on.

Ignoring What "They" Say

So, do you remember the compost I put in the tires? I have an update. All 18 pea plants spouted and grew for me until I forgot to water them for a week while the daily highs were from the mid 90's to 104F and lows only down to 60F. Then the deer walked up to the house and chewed on the ones that survived. They say pea plants don't produce pods after it's above 70 degrees on a regular basis. I say peas eaten right off the vine that you've grown yourself beats anything the store sells.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 4/4

Choosing Your House for Living Successfully:

Whether your income is of the Nomad Model or the Farmer Model, you can still build your own house and get something better than you can buy for the same price.

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, has built something that is very close to the ideal Nomad's house. Unlike the standard trailers you get, he has built it with the top of the line stuff. It is built to be lived in for an extended period of time, not just camped in for a few days of the year for a few years. Inside an hour, he could pack things so the don't fall about, hook it up to a truck and drive just about anywhere he needs to and would have his whole house and everything he owns right there with him. With less than 300 square feet, it will be cheap to heat or cool even with only R-13 insulation and harsh temperatures. Considering how close I came to doing more or less the same thing, I can't say the Idea is a bad one. My Idea involved a motor home optimized for my use and a small car I could tow behind it. The only issue I have with his house is I see a structure that will not tolerate extensive moving. I have seen sturdily built wooden framed constructs built on trucks and trailers, and I have seen them fail under the shaking, rocking, and torquing that they suffer while being moved. While the building was built well, I do not see holding up to a nomadic lifestyle because the wood itself will not tolerate the constant stress on the joints of the frame.

The house I am building is very much a Farmer Model house. It will probably end up weighing a hundred tons. It will be labor expensive and very immobile. This means I need a Farmer Model income. I have had the Idea of starting my own business for some time, and have been considering it more strongly since I became unemployed back in January, but now that I have been unemployed for 6 full months and have turned in over 75 resumes without a peep in response, I have gone and gotten my business license. Already I have jobs lined up. My home territory is probably limited to about 150 miles at this point, but with a job taking most of a week, I can see getting to the point where a home range of hundreds of mile could be justified with the proper equipment.

End.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 3/4

The Hybrid Nomad Farmer Model:

People often like to think that hybrid systems would give you the advantages of both systems involved. My experience and observations indicate that the opposite is true. Hybrid systems suffer the limitations of both systems and fail to properly realize the advantages of either. The Nomad Farmer is no exception.

A Nomad Farmer arrives to find fresh fields and abundant wild herds and starts to build expensive Farmer Model living quarters and expensive Farmer Model embedded infrastructure, only to pick up and leave the most expensive parts when the local ground becomes exhausted and the wild herds migrate. More often than not, he leaves poorer than when he arrived.

There are no examples of successful Nomad Farmer Empires. The lifestyle is so wasteful, that the chances of success of any measure are sufficiently remote and improbable that Empire building by these people is never more than a dream.

I personally know two families who have spent their adult lives pursuing the Nomad Farmer Hybrid Model. Up and down the West Coast they went chasing work like modern Nomads, yet whether they rented or bought, their money was spent on housing and land that did not move with them. Stuff acquired would be tossed or stacked in epic loads on trailers and moved using great heroics. Unfortunately, I believe the biggest mistake lies in that they tried to live in these places like they were Farmers. They spent money on housing They couldn't pick up and move and acquired things they couldn't move. The result is they enjoy temporary benefits from the new location, but often ended up with less each time they moved. The severity of the problem actually increased with the increase of Nomad income, because that enabled the purchase of more Farmer type purchases.

The only success I have seen involved a couple that happened to move to California during a particularly rich time. While earning a Nomad's wage, they managed to pay two mortgages at once. This combined with selling the California house at one of the peaks of California real estate markets, was able to ultimately buy their current place outright. They have lived here for a record breaking 15 years in spite of sketchy employment. They were able to finally able to live in a full Farmer Model residence and have built the best they have ever had. The problem is, they didn't do it until they were 60 and nearly retired. Two others I know, have embraced self employment and the Farmer model early. They have suffered robbers. Boy howdy have they suffered robbers. Yet in this big economic crunch, they are doing better than the Nomad Farmers I know. They are not without their money problems, but yet they are financially better off because their Farmer Model income matches their Farmer Model acquisitions.

To be continued.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 2/4

The Farmer Model:

The Farmer lifestyle model is characterized by permanent stationary structures that are frequently large, and equipped with many features and extensive embedded infrastructure. The Farmer model require good farm land to succeed. This perennially good farmland permits the farmers to build expensive unmovable living quarters and lots of expensive infrastructure that will pay for itself over time.

The Empires of the Farming model are numerous and have been known to last as long as 500 years under the same government. The Roman/ English/ American Empires are premiere examples.

Quite naturally, since the American Empire is a Farmer Model Empire, the commonly accepted American Dream is that of Home ownership. Even the smallest of homes are much too big to hook up to a truck and tow away without thousands of dollars of equipment, expertise, and permits. They are usually designed and built to be hooked up to the buried infrastructure built by the community to provide even the most basic features like water, power, and sewage. Frequently at least some land not covered by the house is included, and has some kind of boundary structure like a fence or at least some markers.

If you earn your money by running your own business and moving outside of your home territory will only hurt you, then you have a Farmer's style income. Then you can build a Farmer style house as you have little reason to move.

To be continued.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 1/4

While I am digging up files that may or may not be backed up, let me ramble on Living Successfully versus Successfully Living. Successfully Living means you managed to survive something. Living Successfully means you are thriving. Successfully Living is something we do every day. For some, it is a lot of work, but it's something everybody does. Living Successfully require something more. From the aspect of choosing your housing, let's look at lifestyle models of human society in four parts.

The Nomad Model:

The Nomad lifestyle model is characterized by temporary and movable structures and no embedded infrastructure. They succeed on poor land because their living quarters are cheap to build and or movable. When the grazing land is used up or the herds they are hunting move, they fold their tents and move on. They recognize that acquiring too much stuff results in waste, because it has to be left behind or will incur a substantial cost to move it. If any infrastructure is built at all, it little more than a well.

The biggest nomadic achievement is probably the Mongol Empire. It sprang from a band of nomadic herdsmen in 1206 AD and in 73 years it conquered 1/6th of the planet and 100 million people. It stretched out and touched lands from Korea to Poland. It stands as the single largest empire to be ruled by a single government ever. 15 years later it broke into 4 parts and proceeded to go into free fall.

Modern Nomadic structures range from tin shacks thrown up in a shantytown using whatever materials that can be found, to travel trailers, to motor homes. Motor homes and travel trailers come in various qualities. Most travel trailers are like the Prowler that The keeper of the mountain bought. Their frames are of wood that is stapled together, wrapped in aluminum, given maybe 2 inches of insulation, lined inside with cheap wood facing, and sold by slick salesmen who want you to think you actually like the boxy styling and ugly paint. Your better motor homes and travel trailers are made of buses and transport trucks. These have welded or riveted metal frames as well as a metal exterior. Even on these, installation tends to be skimpy, because installation is space hungry and they are usually driven to mild climates by people on vacation, not lived in for years in hot or cold environments such as where I live.

If you earn your living working for someone else, with little or no warning you could be dismissed from that job. Does your company promise lifetime employment? Lifetime Employment promises proved to be empty for many Japanese. Are you the third generation that is working for the same company? General Motors has had such workers, and many are now looking for work in the region with the worst unemployment rate in the nation. Finding another position may mean you must relocate. This places you squarely in the position of being a modern nomad. You need a house you can pack up in a day and drive away without leaving anything behind.

To be continued.

Vista Fail

My Vista laptop decided not sign in this morning. After several tries, I told it to reload windows. All of my unbacked up stuff is now gone. I plan to dual boot it with Ubuntu so I have an operating system that won't just sit there when I tell it to do stuff.

This laptop, from when I bought it new, has been freezing up for a half minute or so on a regular basis and sometimes it would take 5 minutes to close a window. I think it's safe to say Vista is Windows ME 2.0. Windows ME was bad enough you'd think they would have been smart enough to not make a second one, but hey, they make 14 billion a year in profit making junk like this, why should they change?

Solar Observatory: Part 2

I've had a rather remarkable problem using my Solar Observatory. Even though I'm working around the longest day of the year, rain and early morning fog have been conspiring to block out the sun. A curious development for a month that brings us less than 2 inches of rain.

Utility Room 1

Following the Concrete Party, steady progress has been made on the Utility Room. The overhanging structure here is supported by heavy pieces of angle iron embedded under the framing.

The over hanging structure is this sitting window. The windows are all double pane second hand windows from Habitat.







The OSB is now painted to help preserve it. Next year we will put siding over it.










The nice wide space under the right half of this window proved to be a source of injury. It's a nice wide space that looks like it is a good place to pull yourself into the room from outside.




The problem is, just above the line of sight is the bottom of the window sill. I attempted to pull myself through with great conviction and got a nasty knot on my head for my efforts. Not 15 minutes later, my dad whacked his head on the same spot. We decided it would be a good Idea to put up the piece of siding before it happened a third time.

Pro Tip! An "A" frame ladder over the front walk way creates a quick superstitious burglar barrier. :)

Solar Observatory: Part 1

So here is my Solar Observatory. I'm slightly embarrassed to say it cost me $42 in parts. If I had driven another 15 miles or so for the parts, it would probably have been cheaper, but with gas prices what they are...

I still need to buy a compass and an angle measuring device to make it complete. I may mount the bottom in a small slab of concrete. I haven't decided yet.

The board on top has a 1 inch hole drilled in it to allow the sun to shine into the end of the 1/2 inch pipe, while it casts a shadow onto the target board attached to the other end.

The street L at the top of the stand is greased so it will allow horizontal and vertical rotation. When it is lined up with the sun, a round spot of sunlight shows up on the target board as it does in this picture.

There is an incredible amount of flex in the stand pipe, and the tolerance of the sight is so small that it takes a bit of hunting to get it to line up. finally at 10:12 AM I got it to line up.

By 10:14 AM the angle has changed enough to reduce the spot to a half circle, and by 10:16 AM, it was gone completely.

I plan to do my measuring on or near 5 specific days.

#1: The summer solstice, June 21st.
#2: Half way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, August 5.
#3: The autumn equinox, September 22.
#4: Half way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, November 6.
#5 The winter solstice, December 21.

Since the spring equinox is nearly the same as the autumn equinox, I can skip those.

I'll have to find the rest of the parts for it in the next week so I don't miss this years summer solstice.

Vicious Hunters II

At least one of my Vicious Hunters decided she preferred to poop in a corner instead of the litter box, so I'm evicting then during daylight hours. I heard that washing the spot with ammonia will stop them from using a spot again. Since it is a concrete floor, I just went ahead and washed the spot with bleach. When I let them back in, looked at the spot and wouldn't come within 18 inches of it. The other one ran right up against the spot and hissed violently at the spot. They are both find the spot highly offensive now. Their sensibilities have been violated.

Rainy Day and Monday

I woke up this morning to a soaking rain. No, that's not entirely true. I woke up at 4 AM when my two vicious hunters decided to lick me in the face because their food dish had gone empty, but that's a separate subject. As it stands yesterday, we are 1.75 inches short on rain around here. That may not sound like much, but the entire month of June only dumps an average of 1.86 inches of rain, so this morning's rain is a good thing. This is the first rain I've received that allows me to note where the cabin still leaks. I have identified three leaks in the areas I use, so I can now keep important stuff out of those areas. Also good about this rain is that it confirms that putting the tire compost bins under the eve to funnel more than the usual amount of rain into them is working as well.

I got some more information on on Prowler Rebuild this morning from my brother, The Keeper of the Mountain. The windows are Low-E windows from Pella. I'm not sure what their specific stats are, but they aren't your grandfather's windows in that there are more good qualities to them than being able to see through them.

I'm a long way from putting windows in my place, but I've picked out the basic type of window I have in mind. They will allow solar heat to pass right through them (High SHGC), but won't let heat escape through air leakage (Low AL) or heat transfer (Low U). Since each of the four windows I have in mind will point to a different point of the compass, so the they will each have a different sun shade designed specifically for their roles in the house's function.

To build these sunshades properly, I need to build myself a simple solar observatory. While taking my local Latitude line and adding and subtracting the tropic lines to determine the sun's angle at my local solar noon has some value, the value of actually measuring the angles of the sun once an hour on 5 key points in the year is an order of magnitude greater. The summer solstice is coming up in a couple weeks, so I need to get busy with that, or miss my oportunity for the next year. I'll write more about this later.

The Keeper of the Mountain assures me that he has no intention of hauling his trailer around much. Moving it will be a rare but possible thing, not a regular occurrence. This tells me that his use of nails and T-111 are not a big deal as it won't be suffering the torquing, flexing, and shaking a travel trailer would have to deal with. At 8.5 feet by 32 feet he is able to put a lot of quality stuff in it affordably. With lots of meticulous care of the external weatherizing maintenance, this could last 20 to 30 years without serious repairs.

One of the things I over looked, is that early in his project, he performed a spring over axle conversion. This is usually done to 4x4 trucks to provide greater ground clearance. In this case, he did it to get the wheels out of his living space. Both are very good reasons to do this.

I guess if you go to the lumber yard to pick up lumber with a minivan your operation may get called "cute." I recommend going with a pink minivan and nice bows on the lumber for the complete effect.

Umbrellas and Compost

I've started my third stack of tires for my composting. This third stack actually has real household trash in it. The other two are just straw and dirt. I planted 9 pea seeds in the top of each of the full ones. According to the label, they won't produce peas once the temp goes above 75F on a regular basis. Our temps went from freezing to the upper 80s inside 3 or 4 weeks. That means I should see no pea pods from these plants. Pea plants, however, are nitrogen fixers. That means they enrich the soil regardless of whether it produces pods or not. That enrichment of the dirt is primarily what I'm after, so pea pods are optional.

I sat down and worked out a typical roof truss construction for my house roof. There are several ways to do it, buy I've decided to go with the Japanese Umbrella look. At the peak, the rafters will be every 2 inches at the peak and every 24 inches out by the eve. There will be about 80 of these.

I worked up a model for an 8 foot peak and a 10 foot peak. Considering my observations of roofs around here, I think I will go with the steeper 10 foot peak, as steeper roofs tend to survive long enough to qualify as old.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Finishing

The prowler rebuild marches on toward the finish line. Here you can see wood paneling installed in the bedroom. He is choosing a mixture of Hickory, Pine, and Mahogany for the place.

I want to say the star on this door indicates that it is an energy star product, but I haven't found the particulars on this symbol. Windows come with 3 different ratings. There is a rating for air leakage (AL), Visible Transmittance (VT), Condensation Resistance (CR), Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC), and U-factor. I recommend visiting mapawatt for more information and use this handy selection tool to guide you. Any investment you make on energy conserving products in you home have a better payback rate than the stock market.

It takes a special kind of awesome to put a vaulted ceiling in a single wide. To me, this almost makes up for it being a trailer built with nails and T-111.

Trash: Compost

While I am neither a tree huger nor a Earth worshiper, I do value land and resources and I see landfills as a waste of both. To act in harmony with this, I am looking to handle all my trash on my own land. To do this, I am composting all my biodegradables.

The bottom tire got only one sidewall cut out. I cut the side wall out right near the tread. With the other three tires, I cut one sidewall next to the tread and cut the other one a couple inches away from the tread.

Cutting the sidewall out is quite easy. You take a 1/2 inch or larger wood drill and drill a hole in the side wall right where you plan to cut. Then you take a jig saw with a wood blade, stick it in the hole you drilled, and saw away. Keep in mind that the treads have steel threads in them and the bead of the tire has a steel cable embedded in it. These are made of very hard steel and should only be taken on out of necessary.

I placed the tire under the eve so it will receive more than the standard amount of rain water. I stuck a piece of a sheet metal in the bottom to prevent voles from burrowing up into the stack.

I started filling the tire with a shovel of straw and a shovel of dirt. This straw has been setting on the ground for over a decade. The straw has been wet for about 3 months of each year and then dehydrated for the rest of the year. The straw is in pretty bad shape, but still identifiable.

I had originally expected that it would take weeks or months to fill these four. The clean up efforts I engaged in filled it up inside a single day. I have at least that much straw again laying around. I'll keep the top tire 1/2 to 3/4 full and keep it wet and cut up four more tires.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Utilities

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, drove his "testosterone sucking minivan" to the hardware store and bought more supplies for his Prowler. Those are his words, not mine. I drive and older version of the same make of minivan and do the same thing.

He's run the plumbing,

electricity,

R-13 insulation, interior studs,

and HVAC.

Vicious Hunters

This is now a legitimate blog now. It has cats in it. I got these two vicious hunters on May 24. They are still frightened by my size, but if I catch them unaware, they are willing to suffer to suffer a petting. They have grown used to my place enough to start romping around at night.

This place is quiet enough that you can hear snow hit the ground. So when kittens charge across my carpeted plywood floor, it's loud enough to wake me up. I turned on my white noise generator on to drown them out last night. It worked up until the bolder of the two, the one with white feet, crawled up on top of me.

I have started putting their food up on the top of the fridge from morning until 7PM. The Idea is to connect 7PM to food in their minds. I want to reintroduce them to the out doors, but I want to close them indoors for the night to protect them from the coyotes until I can by a Mossberg and drop the local coyote and errant dog population a bit.

Mailbox of Doom

About 16 years ago, when I lived in Lake Stevens, Washington, we had trouble with people smashing our mailbox and knocking it over. I got some 1/4 inch steel plate and welded up this 76 pound mailbox. I mounted it on a 7 & 1/2 foot steel I-beam cemented in the ground. Several people that decided to turn around in our driveway left some paint from their cars on the box.
After moving here, this box has gone through a variety of posts. The biggest risk to the post here is the snow plow. It will both knock the post sideways and up as it shoves snow up against it.

This is my latest post. It is double hinged so it will go up and down and side to side and the springs on the back will push it back.

The bad news is I didn't have any numbers on the support springs so I couldn't determine if they were strong enough to hold it up until it was installed. Worse, I came down with Cave Troll Flu right then and it sat there hanging for almost 2 weeks.

Now that I am mostly recovered, I proceeded to fix the problem. Since the Post office tells me they want it 42 inches from the ground, I stuck a 42 inch stick under the end of the box and measured the length of the springs. I cut two pieces of pipe 12 inches long and slid them inside the springs. This held the box up right at the correct height while still allowing the post hinge up when the plow goes by.

With it structurally sound, I got some paint and painted the whole thing white. The other mailboxes now look pretty sad.

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.

Cave Troll Flu

You hear a lot about Swine Flu in the news lately. I came down with something 2 Sunday mornings ago and it lasted about 8 or 9 days. Since Swine Flu seams to last about 48 hours, I'd say it wasn't Swine Flu. Since I got grumpy and didn't want to communicate with the outside world, I'm dubbing it the Cave Troll Flu. That does not mean nothing has been happening around here. There have been several developments I will be sharing over the next few days.

Prowler Rebuild continued - The pros and cons of T-111-

While I'm alternating between 3 different projects of my own, I received more picture of the Prowler rebuild. He is putting a peaked roof on his rebuilt Prowler. In my opinion, peaked roofs are superior to flat roofs in almost every way until you get to building large buildings. This roof will not sag down and puddle water in the middle like many camp trailers do.

The OSB turn out to be a T-111 variant. There are 2 basic types of T-111 available. Their is the plywood version and the OSB version. A Google search for T-111 confirms much of what I already knew. A lot of people start having water related problems with the stuff after it is 10 years old. Careful maintenance may get you 30 years out of the stuff, but generally you want to replace it with something better when it goes bad.

I am reminded of a wooden canopy my dad built for his pickup bed. It was built of 4x4s and plywood that was screwed together and sealed up with silicone. As I recall, it took less than a year for the vibrations and flexing of the truck to cause the canopy to leak on every seam. Wood may be flexible, but it was the wrong kind of flexing for that canopy.

I suspect this will have the same problem. As the frame flexes as it goes down the road, it will put stress and strain on the building materials and building techniques that were engineered for the non moving variety of house and will significantly age the house every time it is moved. If this is held together with nails, then it will probably be even worse.

The good news is, T-111 is relatively cheap and if water does get into the framing, it should be able to get back out, unlike the metal did in it's original construction. If he doesn't move it a lot, has no need for this trailer or is prepared to replace the siding in 10 years it isn't a bad choice. It's not like a trailer is something you expect to last.

Prowler Rebuild

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, has made progress on his Prowler. He didn't provide much in the way of explanation, but he did send pictures.

Picture #1 suggests to me he took the oportunity to redo the wiring and look over the brakes and bearings. There is no better time to do this than when you have a bare frame.


Picture #2 appear to indicate he is laying down treated 2x4s to provide a base to work on. The sheeting is probably a moister wrap of some kind.

Picture #3 is the actual floor framing. It looks like 2x6s with 5+1/2 inch fiberglass insulation. The 2x6s should be what actually carries and spreads the weight stress of the structure. The insulation is about 3 times what you usually find in trailers. He is currently a bout 300 miles from me in a very mild climate, but if he ends up near me, he's going to benifit from this increased insulation a lot.

Picture #4 is the subflooring. The gray stuff appears to be glue. My experiences would make me not want anything to do with OSB, but it might be OK here.

Picture #5 is the wall framing. These appear to be 2x4s. I have another brother who is involved in some repair remolding of some buildings made about 10 or 20 years ago. He says OSB should be illegal. I agree. I have great reservation about seeing this stuff being used structurally like this. If he does a flawless job of keeping it dry, he may be OK though. I'm sticking by my ridiculous theory that he will end up regretting this stuff at some point.

#15 of 10: Plumbing

Someone once wrote that: "Of ten things that can go wrong with a house, 15 of them involve water." Today's problem involves plumbing. In the bottom left of this picture is where the water entered the cabin. While this was working, this would always freeze on us several times during the winter. After the cabin was moved out of, this finally broke. If you go around the corner to the right and pull out the washing machine, you come to Picture #2.

Embedded behind the stucco are the hot and cold water pipes. The water comes from the right and enters the cabin to the left. These faucets feed the washing machine. Hot is on the bottom and cold is on the top. When the pipes broke inside the cabin, the capped off the water with some plastic plumbing. This proved to be too close to the cold cabin and proceeded to freeze and break. I chipped away the stucco with a hammer and capped off the pipes with a metal plug and cap. I'll redo the stucco later. with the water on again, I checked all the faucets. They seem adequate for now, but the toilet has lots of problems. The float valve does not let water in the tank, the flapper does not keep water in the tank, and when flushed, the water doesn't go down very fast. It's going to need to be overhauled.

On the upside, the old hearth is removed and lights are hung with nails and wire coat hangers. It make for a passable computer room. another light hung in the bedroom, a couple rounds with the vacuum, and they are almost a home. I have the guts of a broken clock hung as art and I have more art behind the flat screen I'll hang later.

I'll need an internet connection before its officially a home though. Getting a WLAN to span 1000 feet will be an interesting trick.

I decided to leave the wires as is. The bare ones aren't live and the live ones haven't caught fire in the decade they have been there, so I'm not going to mess with them until I tear the place down.