House A Day: Free small house designs delivered weekly.

Hello survival,

I'd like to introduce you to a project of mine that I'll be working on in my free time. It was partially inspired by the thread in here asking for a network for survivalists, it just went in an utterly different direction than I originally intended, due to various situations in between.

For the moment, it is a blog that I will be posting house designs to on a weekly basis. The designs will be for buildings of under 1000 square feet, primarily intended to be built with Cob due to its ease and price point for the first-time builder. All designs will be created with the intent of being built for under $5000 CAD.

In the long run, I would like to build it into somewhere that people can go not only to find free and intriguing designs for shelter, but also where they can go to find cheap land and interesting people to build with. Whether this will be facilitated by aggregating classifieds from around the globe, or some other means, I do not know yet. I've found that one of the greatest problems outside of affording to build a house, at least where I am from, is first being able to find a buyer for your first-born son in order to finance the land to build your house, so this would act as a partial aid to stopgap that.

Of course, now you are wondering, "How does this apply to the survival forum". Why, it has everything to do with you guys! I'll be generating and giving away plans for shelters that are under 600 square feet, that are intended to be built with as little non-scavenged material as possible, by someone with no construction experience, for very very cheap. Isn't that something that would come in handy for the end of civilization?

In any case, you can check out the site at House A Day I'll be putting the first finished design up this weekend, if all goes well, with another coming every Friday afterwards.

But, a disclaimer, I am in no way an accredited architect. I simply happen to have voraciously read a disturbing number of books on the subject over the past few years and done a few designs that impressed people. So I decided this would be a fulfilling hobby. As a result, if you follow a design and your shelter explodes, please do not sue me

Edit: A subscription function is available for those wishing to be notified when a new design is uploaded!

[edit on 16-9-2009 by D.E.M.]

That's an excellent idea. A great contribution. I can't wait to see it. The site is looking good already. It would be nice to have some sort of mailing list so that those of us with short attention spans could reminded that there are new plans waiting to be viewed.

I don't want to be a pain, but it would be really cool if you just posted you new designs up here as well when they were ready.

Oh quite certainly. I haven't worked with Wordpress in quite some time, but I'll be adding something of that functionality shorty, it's not exactly a site that people will be jumping off the rooftops to visit daily, I'm sure

No prob posting a notice here when they go up, but I'll keep the long drawn out details over there so I don't bore people and swamp the thread

Originally posted by D.E.M.
primarily intended to be built with Cob

What is Cob?

Cob is a mixture of clay, sand, straw and earth mixed together with water to create a strong and durable building material. Much like Adobe, but designed for more northern climates. Properly maintained, a cob building can last for centuries.

You can find more information here Cob on Wiki or through some of the links on my site

Hey Ryan, very very cool. I have always dreamed of building and
living in a home made with rammed earth construction. Very similar
to cob minus the straw I suppose. Anyhoo, neat links - the hobbit
house is awesome as is the hollyhock home.
Good luck on your building, I hope you can get things together to
make it happen.

Thanks. Sorry I did not get the initial plan up this weekend, life took precedence unfortunately. On the other hand, this gives me time to refine it for this weekends upload