I love the look of that house, seems extremely cosy and well-designed.
But it's pretty hypocritical to present it as cheap and frugal.
The cost of a house is land + labor + material. Land costs depend on where you want to live, but can be the biggest factor. He mentions 1500 hours of labor, which, if you were paying somebody to do it, would be somewhere around 100000 USD (full cost of a skilled craftsman is around $60/hour). And even the 5000 dollars for materials is a fool's calculation, since he mentions using scrap materials, i.e. stuff that somebody else had to pay to produce.
If you want something truly sustainable, i.e. not something pseudo-green and feelgood-ecologigal, but something that anybody can afford, you'd unfortunately would have to go with a mass-produced high-rise block of flats.
Not a fan of the do-gooder hypocrisy here, but as an example of an architectural style that blends into nature it's adorable and looks fantastic.
Initially we had no capital and we had decided resolutely to be full time parents whilst our children were young. As you’ll appreciate to be a full time mum and part time dad our income is low, about £5,000 p.a, so a mortgage was not an option and the prospects for renting seemed grim. Providence came our way and a landowner offered us the chance to move to his woodland in west Wales to build an eco-house. There would be no formal security or long term ownership, but £2000 was available for materials, so we jumped at the idea without a backward glance.
Sounds like just the sort of risk-taking, scrappy bootstrapping story that'd do well on HN, but everyone seems to be bagging it.
ps. Scrap = things that other people are chucking away, or will have to pay to take away. Making use of it is a good thing.
If it was presented as a scrappy bootstrapping story that would be one thing but the article's title is misleading in that it says it was only $5000 to build, which the actual cost was a lot more, the total expenditure was $5000 , but total coast of materials and labor puts it well above $5000. This is more what people were thinking.
Which all seem to follow the exact same pattern, ie. only counting the cost of materials that you have to buy. From that link:
The Soft Courtyard House
This design draws heavily on bamboo, which is readily available in China...
The Recycled Materials House
As the name implies, this two-story structure uses locally- and regionally-available recycled materials, both to reduce costs and to promote sustainable housing practices. For example, fly ash residue from local coal-burning factories supplements the concrete medium and replaces the more expensive cement component.
The composition of these L-shaped corner walls would be rammed earth and bamboo. In an innovative twist, the formwork that produces the rammed earth walls can be disassembled and then reassembled to create the roof.
Not saying that these aren't all excellent ideas, but if the original article is 'misleading', then yours is too.
He mentions 1500 hours of labor, which, if you were paying somebody to do it, would be somewhere around 100000 USD (full cost of a skilled craftsman is around $60/hour).
This statement could be used against almost anything falling under DIY, hacking, hobby work, etc. I mean, sure, you are technically correct, but who counts that, if you are having fun doing something for yourself.
Everything has an opportunity cost. In this case, he managed to both go to work and build a house. He gave up his hobbies and in return built a house for "free" (gaining a new short-term hobby). How much are you and I giving up by reading HN right now? It's very, very difficult to attach a dollar value to opportunity cost when you weren't going to be doing anything money-making with that time anyway.
Agreed, but then the headline should have been "Guy has a fun time spending 1,000 hours building a neat looking house."
What bothers me is the bait and switch. It's bad journalism, but I would bet that the people who find this economically or ecologically "good" would be disinclined to change the headline because something to the effect of "dude has fun hobby" doesn't have the same "social good" connotations as the current headline.
Yeah, I'll bet a mass-produced high-rise in China costs way less than $5000 per one-room unit, and at practically zero land cost, too, given its vastly smaller footprint. That's a damn good point.
A used shipping container is about $2,000. You'd want to check it for chemicals. It's closer to $10,000 if you want them fitted out as something you can live in, though. I'm not sure about the charm factor.
I can't imagine that one couldn't build a shipping-container sized building with wood for a lot less than $2000. Fir 2x4 and 2x6 timbers are literally dirt cheap right now. Throw in some siding, drywall, some insulation, and some roofing materials and you'd have a pretty nice shell of a house for about the same price. Best part about using wood is that you wouldn't be stuck with the long, skinny configuration; you could alter the dimensions quite a bit without too much extra cost.
Shipping containers are always proposed as the ideal solution for someone else. Nobody would actually choose to live in such a shithole if they had other options.
Shipping containers are suggested because they tend to offer a great base for construction on the cheap. They're solid structurally (since they need to be stacked, full 4/5 high) and they're very portable for getting to a site fully built. I don't think anyone is suggesting living in a raw container. They're just a great starting point.
There's a lot of creative ways to turn these into a home.
Shipping containers are a fetish among people who don't know what they are talking about - the pictures show two types of structures - structures few people can afford and structures few people would choose to live in.
None of them are as sensible as traditional modular housing:
From 2004-2010 I lived in both shipping containers (refitted) and trailers (basically 12' wide knock-down structures) and wooden shacks (and houses).
There are things I'd do with shipping containers to turn them into livable housing, but they go beyond a basic conversion -- it's cutting them apart and basically using them as a source of sheet steel and study frames. Normal steel structures or tilt-ups accomplish basically all of this already.
Prefab modules for things like kitchens/bathrooms, combined with inexpensive ways of enclosing space, is the way to go.
One can make some surprisingly beautiful houses out of shipping containers. I can't find the link at the moment but one such company advertises in dwell magazine. Hopefully I can find it.
For houses featured in Dwell, shipping containers are merely a fetish incorporated into million dollar+ dwellings.
Shipping containers are uninsulated and have stressed skin construction - they require a lot of work to be used as a thermal envelop, or when incorporating fenestration (not to mention blowing out a whole side.
With the economic downturn, the glut of shipping containers is long gone and prices for used containers have risen significantly over the past several years.
A lot of those buildings which are featured in glossy architectural rags are actually built with custom modules, not actual containers because the dimensions of a standard shipping container are suitable for...well, shipping, not human habitation - 7'-10" inside height before interior ceiling and wall finishes are added (and that's if your insulation is exterior).
I believe it, but at a certain point you are just using the containers as a metal frame with sheet metal sides that you are cutting a lot of holes in, and at some point it would make more sense to just build a metal framed building in the first place.
But it's pretty hypocritical to present it as cheap and frugal.
The cost of a house is land + labor + material. Land costs depend on where you want to live, but can be the biggest factor. He mentions 1500 hours of labor, which, if you were paying somebody to do it, would be somewhere around 100000 USD (full cost of a skilled craftsman is around $60/hour). And even the 5000 dollars for materials is a fool's calculation, since he mentions using scrap materials, i.e. stuff that somebody else had to pay to produce.
If you want something truly sustainable, i.e. not something pseudo-green and feelgood-ecologigal, but something that anybody can afford, you'd unfortunately would have to go with a mass-produced high-rise block of flats.
Not a fan of the do-gooder hypocrisy here, but as an example of an architectural style that blends into nature it's adorable and looks fantastic.