Underground Home

Something of a hiatus but we're still around.

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:12:00 +0000

YES.

That isn't us, it's these folks, but we're still around, and still looking forward to our own underground place. 5-10 years.

A Low Impact Woodland Home

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:56:00 +0000

Not as far underground as our plan, but probably a few orders of magnitude more beautiful, and much cozier than what we've thought up.

Utterly awe-inspiring. Check it out at SimonDale.net

Acid-stained concrete flooring.

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 04:31:00 +0000

Who said concrete has to be ugly.

TheConstructionDeal.com has a blog detailing acid stained flooring that I find very informative and exactly what I'm picturing for a durable attractive and straightforward floor-solution. From the article:

Acid Stained floors are growing in popularity. Many people are looking to stained floors as an alternative to carpet, tile and wood. In addition to the marbled beauty of the surface, acid stained floors are low maintenance and don’t retain dust which may affect some people’s allergies. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the first people to use Acid Stain on floors in the 1920’s.

Everything2

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:14:00 +0000

Everything2 has a fun and funny article up concerning underground housing. The author is by no means an expert, but more akin to myself, someone very interested in building underground, who has done their homework on the subject. From the article:

"Earth houses are extremely awesome. The earth is 100% soundproof. Sheer novelty will keep visitors in awe and thinking that the owner must be some kind of deity. In case of attack by hordes of Mongolians, underground houses are defensible, they slighly resist fire (they take it better than a normal house, anyway), and can include hidden escape tunnels. The roof of an earth house can be planted on- the only space that can't be used twice is the face, and that doesn't apply to Envelopes which can use the courtyard."

Wind Power

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:35:00 +0000

In addition to the possibility of making a small hydro-electric power generator, we also have the more feasible (and cost effective) option of building a few wind generators.

I was perusing Make magazine and came upon a very cheap (about $200) turbine that you can craft in your garage. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and although I can't link to the Make article (subscribers only) I can link to a similar article on the PATH website.

I'm picturing the flat windswept landscape of the area north of the cities, and am thinking that three or four wind generators could significantly offset our electricity use, and possibly even end up making us some money in the long run.

It has to be said.

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:50:00 +0000

So there is an interesting side-benefit to building an underground home that needs to be addressed, as it's been in the back of my mind, but I've been reluctant to speak about it lest I seem a bit daft, or paranoid.

First let me simply direct you to the website Life After the Oil Crash, where a group of individuals is theorizing the downfall of human civilization as we know it.

Second, let me say that I don't really believe them, but that it is something that warrants attention. The reason for this is the simple fact that humans, for all our intelligence, are stupid as hell, and it is quite possible that the next few decades will bring about many opportunities to thrust our species into anarchy.

Now, the reason that I bring this train of though up here is because it is the people who have contingency plans who will be able to live normal lives in the VERY unlikely event that a major event does wash over the earth.

An underground house of the type that we are planning would in such a situation function not only as a great energy saver and fun place to hang out, it would also serve as a bunker and a very low-profile place to hide and live in a wacky-mixed up world. With enough land of suitable quality, it would be possible to grow enough food to be self sufficient, and the energy-efficiency of the house would mean that harsh winters and hot summers would have less effects on us than most.

Now, let me re-iterate that I by no means think that any event such as this is likely, in fact, I think that humans are going to live much the way that we have been for far longer than any of our lifetimes. The fact of the matter, however, is that it can't hurt to be prepared. For the same reason that you bring a multi-tool along when you go camping, we need to simply be aware of the unstable nature of our future.

Greatness

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:50:00 +0000

This guy built an Earth sheltered home in a very similar manner to what we are planning, The differences are the he used concrete blocks for the walls, whereas we are planning on doing poured walls, and that he only has about a foot of earth over his house, whereas we are aiming at 5-10 feet.

Earth Shelter at PineCrest And Underground Primer.

The main thing that he said that resonated with me was that it's much easier to design a house for the land that you buy, as opposed to trying to fit your design in an un-savory situation. Given, the possibility up here is mainly for the flat land around hugo, it still pays to be flexible.

Also, this site has a great little narration about a micro-hydro-electric dam that this guy built, It gives about 400 watts, 9.6 KWh, more than enough to make up the deficit in an active electrical household.

Micro-hydro.

That is all.

It's still on.

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:30:00 +0000

Oh it is very much still on.

Here's the tentative plan:

1) Adam and Vicki Graduate from UWM. I'm making the assumption that we WILL graduate, and likely at the same time, in May 2007. Immediately after this, we will be moving back to MN. Where we will be moving TO is up for discussion. Probably into an aparment in WBL(cheaper) or uptown(awesomer).

2) Gather people willing to make a massive investment in a communal underground home. Thus far the only "for sures" are Joe, Vicki and I. Ideally we would have two additional people/couples/etc. Everyone must be aware that this is a communal living arrangement and that it is likely a lifetime arrangement as well, as selling a 7000 sq foot underground home is less than easy.

3) Wait until everyone is financially stable. Meaning that all parties involved must have a stable source of income and little or no debt. Loans are the main thing to worry about. Financial security is the ability to pay the monthly rate of any home loan that we may take out, plus any monthly debt-related expenses, plus any living related expenses, with enough left over to accommodate any extreme situations.

4) Talk to an engineer and architect and draw up a plan for the house. We have ideas up here, but in order to build, we have to have detailed blueprints and a very smart underground engineer design all the more important aspects of our house. Namely, drainage, specifications, and codes. From this point we will start to know what the cost of the house will be, and we can decide how much each person will have to take on in loans/etc. Likely, with four-six people that will be between 50-75K a-piece.

5) Start construction. We can excavate ourselves, and we can do the furnishings ourselves. We can probably do the electrical and plumbing ourselves. We will want to have a contractor do the HVAC and septic system. We will have to have a contractor do the concrete. The concrete will be by far the most expensive part of the project, taking up about 75-80% of the total cost, but it is also the most vital part to a stable livable house, so there will be no skimping. Skimping can come later when we're talking about furniture and rugs, etc.

6) Live in the house for hundreds of years.

Other things to think about:

a) Purchasing a "normal" house in the interim, and sell it off to pay for the underground house. If we are able to fix it up, we can sell it for a profit, and it would alleviate some of the home loan questions that we are sure to get otherwise (you're building what kind of house?). Also, it would test out whether people are willing and able to live in a communal situation before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a hole in the ground.

b) How awesome would an underground house be if WWIII happens? Very.

c) Our own personal wind/solar power station? Long shot, but it might be feasible if we've got a bunch of extra cash.

Conversation via E-mail

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 19:48:00 +0000

Joe and I were talking about water and heat earlier today, so I figured it would be good to have it on the site.

----------------

Talking with Joe Stienworth last night, I found out that a good person
to talk to about some of this would be his Dad. He lives over by
eaglebrook church in a house that he designed from top to bottom to be
the most energy efficient house in every way. After it was built he
received an award from NSP(think) for basically not having to pay them
any money. It's not an UGHouse, but if I see him I'll have to ask him
a few questions because I'm sure he has helpful knowledge for
insulation on the outside walls, and other things of the like. Apparently
he only needs to start thinking about heating his house in late
November, and even then it's just a couple of logs in the fireplace
for a while.

Also, how will this water running through the floor be heated? Because
the way I understand it, the water running through the pipes is
traditionaly heated by gas. And aren't we not going to have gas out
there? Heating all that water electrically is supposedly more
expensive.

On a different note: I remember my dad telling me about a new type of
water heater that's much more efficient. Rather than heating a large
tank full of water, it heats only what you are using as you use it. So
theoretically you could take an infinitely long hot shower.
The efficiency come in when you're not home, because the water heater
is not trying to regulate the temperature of 80 gallons of water all
the time.

But, I don't know, electric water heaters seem like something that I
should look into, because it seems to me like they could work just as
well.

----------------------

Heh heh, yeah, it would be an electric hot water heater that heats the floors.

You're exactly right, no gas, too hard to deal with, too expensive, and too unreliable.

I seem to remember hearing about this type of hot water heater that you mention, it would definatly be something to look into. We might need two heaters, one for usable water(shower, cooking, etc) and one for the heat.

The great thing about water is that it does take a long time to heat up, but that also means that it takes a long time to cool down as well, making the temperature very stable.

Also, in the UGHouse, we would only need minimal heat from the floor, so it would really only need to be "warm" water, not really hot.

Another couple images from Malcolm Wells

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:02:00 +0000

www.malcolmwells.com

Traditional gas station,

and

Malcolm's concept design for a functional greenspace:

A few Links on the Subject

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:06:00 +0000

Decided it would be benevolent for me to post a few of the more informationally useful links to building underground that I've run across in my travels:

CNN report

Proves that there are some inroads being made into popular culture.

Malcolm Wells

A visionary architect and underground designer. Site has a massive amount of design and construction considerations.

MotherEarthNews.com

Fantastic article by MotherEarthNews that touches on almost every aspect of underground construction, and organizes all the information that a person would need to get started.

Earth-House.com

Earth-House.com has a lot of information, though it is a bit disorganized and unattractive. Has a good repository of already built homes.

Article at Architecture.com

Contains links to different building materials, and goes into EarthShips and sheltered homes.

Lastly, a picture from MalcolmWells.com:

More Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:43:00 +0000

What you see here is a picture of two additional design ideas for the house.

On the top is a simple rendering of a top-down view of a wall. You can see trapezoidal strips of wood, about 2in thick, set in concrete along the walls of the house. They would be installed the same way that normal studs in a wall would, 16in on center. I feel that this would address two important issues:

1) Hangings or anchor points for things that we would want to screw into the wall. Cabinets, art, shelves, etc.

2) Visual interest for the walls. Blank concrete walls would be pretty amazingly boring, but with some nice wood showing through, I think it would look pretty cool. Paint the concrete inbetween the strips, pretty.

Second, you see the courtyard of the house-plan. I've drawn in overhangs for the areas over the house, the reason for which is evident in the image. Summer sun is hottest at Noon, at which time it is nearly directly above our heads. The overhang would block out a large portion of that sunlight, helping to regulate temperature more effectively. Also, overhangs that were designed correctly would still allow the warmest parts of the winter sun to enter the house.

Lastly, I've been thinking about the feasability of a full floor or full ceiling utility corridor.

While doable, I think that it might be overkill. I think that it might be better to have utility troughs running throughout the house, say, at 20ft intervals. This would then section the house off into the 20ft cubes that the design implies.

On that note, I think the first step to deciding how much utility space we need is deciding what utilities that we will want. Must haves are Plumbing, Electricity, Heating, and Ventilation. This is assuming an all electric house (electric heat, cooking, etc.), which is ideal, since gas prices are huge, and connecting gas out in the boonies is difficult and costly.

Plumbing and Electricity take up almost no room, save for the actual centralized water heaters/circut boxes etc. As for Heating, I think that we should seriously consider in-floor heat. With our house underground, it will not need as much heat as a normal house, but it will still get cold in the winter. If we had a separate electric water heater for an in-floor heating system, we could very easily regulate temerature during the winter, as well as keeping the cold concrete floor warm to the touch.

The last thing then would be ventilation. With ventilation separated from heating, it becomes much more simple. All we would need is a central fan system, something that runs along the perimiter walls of the entire house. It would have to be circulated through or near the heating system at leat a little bit in the winter, so that we aren't presented with ice cold air form the outside coming in through our vents, destroying all benefit from the earth's natural insulation.

This way, the utility corridors would only need to hold plumbing and electrical, and ethernet if we wanted to. At that point, it might be easier to simply run them along the ceiling, out in the open, and get rid of a whole extra degree of complexity.

What do you guys think?

A Revamped Floorplan

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:23:00 +0000

I've taken the liberty of composing a possible floorplan for the house. It has changed significantly from what was ideated on MySpace, and now looks much simpler.

As you can see, what I've done is to start with the simplest possible shape for the house, and altered it subtley for our purposes. What you see in the above picture is probably obvious, but I'll explain it anyway. First, you have the blue shaded areas, which represent the private living areas. Each of these has a door out to the courtyard. The large black box bordering the courtyard on the north would be the size and situation of the fireplace. The dotted lines are possible places for the utility corridors, which I will get into in a later post.

The main reasons for having a simple box house as opposed to the "u" shaped one that you see in the earlier post are thus:

1) We will have to excavate the same amount of dirt regardless, so it would make sense to fill in our excavation with actual livable area.

2) A four walled design allows for uniform earth coverage over the entire structure, as opposed to having very little or no coverage at certain corners of the building.

3) A courtyard design is much more logical and efficient in terms of keeping the summer sun out of the house and allowing the winter sun into it.

4) The extra space gleaned in this four wall design alleviates the need for a second or lower level for storage, or could even be used as a small garage or workroom.

5) Perhaps most importantly, it allows for the most bang for our buck and makes excavation and construction much easier.

The other thing that I've done is to condense the plan of the house down considerably. As you can see, it is based around 20ft by 20ft squares. each living area is 20x20, making up 400sq feet, very adequate for a family when not considering kitchen or living room area. What we are presented with is 4800 square feet of total livable area, much more efficient than the 12,000sq feet plan that I was working on beforehand.

This plan also makes the concrete pouring for the floor, all the walls, and the ceiling about $150,000-175,000. If we did the excavation ourselves (a huge job, but doable), it would add about another $5,000, and Heating and Ventilation would likely run about $20,000-30,000. Plumbing and electrical would be about the same, putting the final tally at somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000

Divide that up between four people and each person owes about 50,000-75,000 dollars. When compared to a normal house, which would cost a minimum of 150,000, I think we've got a pretty good thing going here. Even if we were only to divide it up between two people, it would still only run about $100,000 a-peice.

More to come in the coming days.

Updating

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 20:25:00 +0000

I've made a couple of images depicting a few ideas for the house. I also have made a simple floorplan for one possible design for the excavation.

In addition, I was price checking, and it looks like 300K will be about right for the concrete. This is assuming that we build aobut 50% above code, meaning 12in walls, a 18in floor and a 14in ceiling.

One thing that we might want to consider is an overall shrinking of the plan, as we have over 12,000 sq ft of space in the current model, which is a bit of overkill.

We'll have to look into it.

Backtracking

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 03:53:00 +0000

Previously, on MySpace:

We had discussed some early iterations of the house in my blog, so I'll post those here, in an effort to have all the info in one spot.

--------------------------------------------Begin MySpace excerpt:

Starting off, this is the floorplan for a house that would be built completely underground. Underground housing provides more protection from the elements, greater stability, more environmentally acceptable construction, and most of all, virtually no heating or cooling costs. Being underground regulates the temperature year-round at about 55 degrees F.

Keep in mind, this is not an "earth sheltered" home or a cave house, this is a house that is completely buried underground, save for the walls that face the courtyard.

What the floorplan above illustrates is the configuration that I've come up with to get the maximum amount of natural sunlight into the house, while at the same time preserving the natural temperature regulation of the earth. The five exterior walls with no windows or doors (except the main entrance) would all be covered with dirt. Similarly, the roof would be covered with 3-5ft of dirt. The courtyard in the center of the plan is where all the doors and windows are located.

The plan of the house is set up to be lived in by 4-8 adults, or 4 families. The four bedrooms (quite large, 400sq ft each, enough room for ten queen size beds) are all situated off to the sides, and the common ares are centered between the two wings. The house is organized so as to dissolve walls that contemporary houses exhibit, using them only for separation of the private areas of the bedrooms and bathrooms. The kitchen on one end of the house, and the entertainment center on the other end, are meant for use of many groups of people. Two sinks, two ranges, and two refrigerators makes separate tasks easy. The center of the common area is focused on a massive 6ft by 6ft fireplace, open on all sides, that would be surrounded by seating, making use of the five sets of double doors leading out into the courtyard. the two sets of bathrooms are organized so that the people on each wing would share a bath, but have their own sink and toilet, optimizing water efficiency and raw materials, as well as social privacy.

A smaller basement (40ft x 30ft) would be underground, and would be used for storage or recreation, as it would get almost no natural light.

Total Sq Footage = about 3600ft2

I want to built this house...

-----------------------------------Also, later I posted this on MySpace:

It's a view of a possible situation for the house.

You can see the entrance up top, and the garage off to the side.

I think that will do it for the Visual Delight series.

Oh, by the way, Trevor had a great idea for the interior, that would save an ass-ton of money and make installation and maintanence a shit-ton easier. He suggested that we simply run all the plumbing and stuff along the bare concrete ceiling and not cover it up. That way we have tons of places to hang stuff, plus we can make totally awesome designs with the utilities! Also we'd save thousands of dollars on installing a ceiling and hiding the piping and electricity in the walls.

Can anyone say integrated ethernet?

We could talk about leaving the walls concrete as well, but I think the floor would have to be covered.

-------------------------------------------------End MySpace quotes.

Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Levit) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:45:00 +0000

Picture a sprawling suburb, miles and miles of houses and schools, intertwining roads and playgrounds and parks and cars for every man woman and child.

This is the view that is taking over the landscapes outside major cities all over the world. Row after row of houses sticking up out of the ground, each with its own little plot of grass, each with its own driveway and deck out the back. Lakes get hit exceptionally hard, houses crammed in all the way around in an effort to force their way into some element of beauty that the landscape holds.

We propose a more thoughtful alternative. Instead of a single house for every family, why not live in a house with the people that you are good friends with? Instead of building higher, and in the center of a plot of land, why not build under it?

This Blog will address the issues behind the reasons and execution of building an underground home. It will chronicle a small group of Minnesotans who endeavor to craft the perfect communal living space, something that is supremely modular and customizable, yet at the same time have the potential to endure for centuries.

Maybe you'll consider it for yourself.