The last post was for young people starting their home building education in the real world. Today’s is for people who have been out there awhile and have a few miles on them. I am thinking of 25 to 35 year olds. I was 29 when I decided to build my first home. I had obligations, a job, bills, a mortgage and hardly any savings. Does that sound like you?

On the plus side, I had a few assets. I had a nice car that was almost payed off and a collection of stamps, coins, and other semi-precious items that I had saved from my youth. About one third of my little house was paid for and I had My Baby, a 10 1/2 foot long chopper (motorcycle) painted OSHA Safety Purple, that I had to ride after midnight because it attracted too much attention in the light of day.

I know you are ahead of me here and realize that I am going to tell you to sell off anything you have that is worth money. It hurts, I know, but console yourself with the thought that in a couple of years you will be able to buy a better…whatever it is. My Baby had to go. It was heartbreaking. I sold everything I could and it actually turned out to be a freeing experience. The person who said “He who owns little, is little owned” was right.

Anything you owe payments on should go next. I sold my nice little car and replaced it with an old pickup truck that I bought for a few hundred dollars. I estimated it would last two years (it lasted eight, great truck.) All the money went into the credit union because their interest rate was higher than a bank’s and I wanted their cooperation when I needed loans later.

Another area where I saved a surprising amount of money was by altering my entertainment and social life. When I wrote down what all that fun cost me I was shocked. I changed from movies, clubs and parties to long walks in the park and TV and popcorn dates. I got so disciplined about this that I limited myself to only two steady girlfriends. It was tough.

Everyone has different circumstances but the procedure is the same. Sell everything you can to lower your debts as drastically as possible (plus 10% more) and stash your money in an interest bearing account. All this should be accomplished during the first year, which is long enough to do it gracefully. You won’t have time to feel deprived because there will be plenty of interesting things happening to keep you occupied.

If you have a mortgage on a house you have options. I’ll go over those with you next time. For now, go sell something.

* * *

D. Chandler emailed today asking about a stucco finish over bricks on the outside of a house:

D., scroll down these posts to find several that cover just this subject. Yes, you can smear stucco onto exterior bricks but be prepared for the Masons when they come over and do a protest march in front of your house.

Money…always a concern. Sometimes it is useful to comparison think. Something like comparison shopping but not quite. Here is how it goes for our purposes.

Let’s suppose you are a fresh young high school graduate full of hope but financially worthless. Think about where you would get the money if you wanted to go to college. Mom and Dad (mostly Dad) would be the first source. Next would be college loans. Next, perhaps the military. You are thinking like a student.

Let’s compare. You are that same broke but hopeful young person and you want to learn house building - on your own. Where would you look for the funds? Well, start with Mom and Dad as before. Then, instead of college loans, you would look for Venture Capital!!  Sounds exciting and it is. It means you can expand the money hunt to include Uncle Roy or Grammy Mavis, a wealthy family friend, a bank or a credit union. (You won’t have to resort to the Military.) Now you are thinking like a businessman.

You can do this with confidence and pride because instead of looking for a handout you will be borrowing in a businesslike manner, with legal papers, and you will be paying them back with interest. But not just yet. Read the next paragraph before you go loan hunting. You will see a plan developing here.

You may be a young person of no financial means but you are able to work. I recommend that you plan on having one, better yet, two jobs during the whole first year of this home building course. And those jobs should be building houses. Get on a work site and try to learn all you can by direct experience. Work with a mason for a while, then a framer, then a roofer, then a drywall installer and learn about finish work. Making money while learning was called an apprenticeship in the old days.

Watch closely the way each professional does his job. Be especially observant of the plumbers and electricians. Be respectful and learn a lot. Take notes, lots of notes. Take pictures and keep them in order for easy reference later.

This work binge does not have to be done in your home town. In fact, there may not be enough house building locally to be useful to you. But if you are young and fancy free maybe you could go to New Orleans, or Florida where they are begging for construction workers. The pay is very good. It would be a good adventure for you to get away from home and out on your own for 10 months or so.

Being away from hometown temptations might help you save your money. Or maybe big city temptations would be too much for you. I have heard there are lots of pretty girls in cities. Perhaps you should have your checks sent to your Mom and Dad. You know yourself better than I do, I hope.

So, at the end of 10 months you should have a very savvy hands-on understanding of professional home construction with notes and photos to study later. You should have a good stash of money in the bank too. Mom and Dad will be so proud of you they will insist on giving you a venture capital loan to add to what you have. Other loan sources, like banks, credit unions, even Uncle Roy, will have more respect for your proposal if you have some money saved when asking for a loan.

Next time I’ll have money ideas for slightly better off people who have a few assets and want to build a house. There is a lot to talk about yet.

It is exciting to plan big events. What I am proposing here could be an important life changing event, but you don’t have to commit to anything unless you see the sense in it, understand it and have the determination to do it. This kind of self education can easily become a career. It did for me.

For our first adventure in Home Building let’s rough out a time budget. I use two years as a time frame and separate that into one year of preparation and one year of actual building. Since time is relative, your two years may be longer or shorter than mine. Time will tell.

During the first year you will be rearranging your life to focus on the many jobs and details necessary to get you to the actual point of building. In later posts I’ll give you suggestions on how to manage money, subjects to study, basic tools you will and won’t need, how to find the right property and deal with bureaucracy. I will also discuss options for customizing your ‘curriculum’ during Year One, however long it is.

Year Two involves putting what you have learned to use by doing a project. I will show you four different projects ranging from hard to harder to very hard to hardest. (I hope you weren’t expecting this to be a cakewalk.) I will tell you lots more about Year Two later on.

Next post I’ll talk about money. While you’re waiting, look over your vast assets and figure out what you have available to put into this project. I think I can show you ways to enhance your finances that you might not have noticed.

Back to Life Choices. I’m sure you have figured out that I am suggesting you build a house rather than pursue a college degree.

Shocking? Probably. But let’s compare the two choices and their impact on your future. While comparing, do not think of this as a possibility only for 20 year olds. At about any point in your life you could decide it’s time for a change and go for it.

Let’s start with money. College will cost money. Building a house costs money. The amounts in each case vary so much that specific amounts don’t mean much at this stage of planning, but it is a lot.

Just to get a good start on a basic, average college degree takes at least two years. For my house building discourse I’ll be using a time frame of two years for reasons that will soon be evident. So for either of these choices you will need two years’ time and a commitment of a substantial amount of money and not need to work for a living.

Study is necessary for college. Studying will take much of your time while house building too. Studying plans and following directions for assembling things correctly is an expected part of the house building life just like studying and taking tests is part of college life.

House building and college are both taught through “courses.” The first year at college gives you basic courses to help you progress to the next level. The first year of house building, the way I am giving it to you, uses something similar to courses to prepare you for the next level.

If you convince yourself that you are going after a degree in House Building just as you would pursue a degree in, say Liberal Arts, and give it the same level of dedication and commitment as college, you will accomplish a valuable goal. The college degree gets you ready for a better job. House building gets you a home and much more.

Think over the various benefits each of these choices gives you for later in life. You may think of ones I missed. Feel free to add your thoughts to this discussion. I confess that I am prejudiced in favor of house building but I would like to hear your views on either choice.

Next time I will start giving you the curriculum for the freshman year at House Building University.

Reader Terri Anderson has asked my opinion of hay bale construction. I have several and most are favorable.

My first opinion is that hay is for horses. Straw is for houses. There is an important difference between hay and straw. Straw is left over after the nutritional parts of the plant are sent off to become Wheaties. Hay still has all the food value contained in it. Hay remains interesting to food seeking wild life, molds and possibly horses for some time. Straw is not so attractive as food, thereby making it a better building material and it has a slightly better R-value on average.

Hay has been used for building and if rigorous care is taken to keep it encapsulated and very dry, it will work. Straw must be kept dry too but it has the advantage of being less vulnerable to deterioration during the life of the structure.

In areas of the country where grains are grown, straw is low priced and available. Where grain growing is not a big business and animal grazing is, hay usually has a price and availability advantage.

Speaking of money, advocates of straw bale construction often mention its low cost. I have never built one but I have read extensively about them and drawn up some plans and cost estimates just for fun. When straw bale cost is compared to fiberglass insulation in R-value versus wall thickness then straw bale wins hands down. However when the costs of enclosing the straw structurally, covering the outer surface with something to weatherproof it and finishing the interior surfaces to keep the family goat out of it are taken into account, the cost advantage over regular construction starts to diminish.

The structural design (by you or a profe$$ional) must accommodate window and door casings, be strong enough to hold up the roof and take into account the settling of the bales over time. Building 18″ wide straw bale walls on conventional 8″ concrete basement walls requires special attention too. There are the challenges of how to install the plumbing, wiring, heating and cooling systems. Then you have the building code enforcer working overtime writing up all the violations you have to commit when building such a home. You also have bankers to charm and your insurance agent is not going to be happy with you. Your neighbors may shun you because your remarkably unusual home gets so much more attention than theirs. Those are some of the trials and tribulations of the technologically adventurous home builder. Believe me, I know.

But I want to give you hope. So many pioneers in straw bale construction have persevered in their quest for their idea of the perfect home that many of the obstacles have been breached, if not quite overcome. Jurisdictions do exist where builders of straw bale homes are given building permits by the powers that be. Bankers, insurance companies and real estate dealers are realizing there is money to be made here and they are taking advantage of the trend. House plans are available as well as some very good books on the subject, and there are 650,000 Google sites waiting to be studied.

My own experimental alternative design is a straw bale house that is round. This avoids many of the structural technicalities of square designs plus gives more floor area in relation to wall length. (It’s a geometry thing; you can look it up.) The roof is cone shaped, putting an equal load on all parts of the walls. Picture a Yurt shape with bale walls.

You, Terri, are lucky to have a brother who is a mason. I designed my straw bale Yurt with a masonry heat mass around a center chimney that would radiantly heat the home and hold up the roof. An extra safety (and efficiency) factor is the placement of the heat source as far from the (potentially) flammable walls and furniture as you can get in such a structure.

Keep reading here because on my list of stuff to write about is an idea for a wall that equals bales in insulation value and has considerable inherent structural qualities. The main ingredient is easy to find and FREE. Stay tuned.

Next post I will get back to the Life Choices story.

There comes a point in each of our lives when we have to decide how to make a living. Most often that choice comes around high school graduation time. The motivational speakers at graduation events always say “Live your dreams” or “Reach for the stars” or some such drivel. I felt hesitant about taking advice from people, especially men, wearing gowns.

The truth is, everyone except trust fund kids have to develop a plan for their future. It boils down to “Get a job” which equals “Live your dreams,” or “Go to college” which equals “Reach for the stars.”

A job provides you with an income, allows you to get your own apartment, buy that hot Camero and enjoy freedom from curfews. If you work diligently through the years, grading grommets at United Blivits Inc., support the union, get regular raises and earn promotions you can raise a family, buy a home and retire with a watch and a nice pension. You’ll have a pretty good life, maybe even dreamy.

Then there is the college route, available to more people in this country today than ever before. In fact having a degree is almost as necessary as a high school education was when I was young (well…younger) if you want to make it today.

Problem is, college costs big bucks. If your family can’t pay for it you need to get loans and work your way through, stopping occasionally for a cold beer, maybe a bit of partying, perhaps a little…. Point is, you will have to survive without much disposable income and few possessions during your period of educational enrichment.

After two, four, six or more years of hard work you graduate with that precious piece of paper. You are in huge debt but you are now qualified to get - A Job! Sorry, I mean - A Position!

Remember the last post when I talked about the true cost of a home? A college education has similar costs of money, work and time. Paying off a mortgage gets you a Home. Paying for college gets you - Potential. Now what if…?

Think this over. I’ll be back.

When Dave Duffy asked me to host this blog it gave me a chance to talk about subjects that affect building, alternative or otherwise, beyond the kind that use hammer and nails. Here is one.

Buying a home is usually the biggest financial commitment a family makes. Often,while visiting real estate dealers, lawyers and bankers to get qualified for a mortgage and buying a home, some important aspects of what you are doing get obscured. Today I want to focus on two elements of home buying that slip by some people.

First is the real cost, in money, of a home. For this example let’s use a three bedroom modular cape on a modest lot in a subdivision. The price, a bit below national average, is $180,000. I use this example because I actually know people who have bought just such a place. You can adapt the numbers I use to your personal situation.

Let’s say you have been working hard, have $20,000 saved for a down payment and you get a 20 year mortgage at 6% interest on the $160,000 principal. My handy mortgage calculator says your monthly payment will be $1145.60 per month. Maybe a bit more with the little fees and such that banks add to these things.

Some people stop thinking at this point. They have the house, they accept the monthly payment challenge and settle in for the long haul of paying off the house. That payoff, after 240 months, is just about $275,000 plus the down payment for a total of nearly $300,000 dollars. Very sobering.

However, here is where reality takes a bite. To get that 300K you had to earn it. Before you paid the mortgage, even while you were saving up the down payment, you were making payroll taxes. In order to have $300,000 available to buy your home you had to earn closer to $400,000! That is financially brutal.

Now, I know there are accountant types who will talk about deductions and appreciation and “building equity in your home” and all that. Those nebulous benefits are mostly canceled out by insurance premiums, maintenance costs and property taxes. My point is that you will obligate yourself for a huge sum of money for your home which, ironically, won’t truly be yours until the last payment.

Take a deep breath. There is another perspective on what you have committed to when buying this home. Let’s say you have a job at United Blivits and make $50,000 per year. That is for 40 hours per week with two weeks vacation or 2000 hours @ $25 per hour.

$400,000 divided by $25 equals 16,000 hours of your labor or, eight solid years of work (16,000 hours divided by 2,000 hours per year). That is eight years of paying for absolutely nothing but the house. Well…actually house + interest + taxes.

Do your own calculations. Think this over. We will talk again. I have an idea for you.

Ever since I was a kid I have been interested in architecture of all kinds. The most impressive and among the oldest examples are the pyramids. They have been found in a number of places on earth. The best known are in Egypt.

My interest is how these things were built. The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza in Egypt contains two million blocks, each weighing two tons. The original facing on the structure was marble (looted sometime in the past) and there was a special stone at the top rumored to have been gold or gold clad. The designing, planning and the methods involved in the construction of any of these wonders is astonishing.

The most perplexing mystery for me is how all those heavy blocks were stacked up so high. Theories include the use of hundreds of thousands of slaves working hundreds of years, to aliens with gravity defying devices used to float the stones through the air into place.

Among all the clues discovered was one which revealed to me, as a builder, the secret of the pyramids. The clue, attributed to most of the pyramids and other large stone edifices of early history, is the precision fit of the stones. It is commonly said a knife blade can not be inserted into the joints.

If the stones had been quarried miles away and somehow moved to the building site and put in place, getting them to fit so precisely would indeed require the aliens’ anti-gravity devices along with laser stone cutters.

However, there is a way the job could have been done using the available technology, workforce and materials at hand. It is a method called Rammed Earth. Imagine a wooden form 2 cubits x 2 cubits x 2 cubits (3.5′ x 3.5′ x 3.5′) that would produce a 4000 pound block. The form has four sides, no top or bottom, and could easily have been built with skills of the time period. The form is filled with a mix of sand (from the Sahara), clay and a little water (from the Nile) and some blood (don’t want to guess about that) as a binder. As the form is filled it is tamped down until it is very hard - in fact, as hard as stone. Much bigger blocks could be made this way too.

Now suppose the blocks were formed just a few inches away from where they were meant to end up. Once the form was removed the block could be pushed into place with simple levers and a couple of good kicks. If every other stone block was made using the form, the blocks in between could be rammed right in place. This explains the knife blade clue. The seams would be precise and tight.

Workers would use conveniently sized backpack type baskets to transport materials up ramps to the forms as the pyramid rose in elevation. Probably hundreds of forms would have been in use simultaneously. The lowest estimate of workers building the Egyptian pyramids was 3000 to 4000. With the Rammed Earth Method it is feasible for the construction to have been done in just a few years with such a small workforce and there were no unions back then to slow things down.

Add in many centuries of weathering and Rammed Earth blocks would be indistinguishable from quarried stone. I will concede that the marble and some of the special stonework in these structures would be quarried but over 90% of the mass could have been done with Rammed Earth.

I have capitalized Rammed Earth because it is a great building method you should think about. These days with motorized compaction machines, costing much less than slave labor, it is within reason to consider this method as part of your building plans. I suggest you use Portland cement as a more socially acceptable binder than blood. But that is up to you. Google tells all.

If my explanation of the Pyramid secret proves wrong, I am going with the alien theory.

Let’s get to J.R.’s other subject, a Masonry Heater for his new home. He has the basics right. The efficiency is much higher when burning the wood at a high temperature with air brought from outdoors directly to the combustion chamber. The heat is absorbed by the large mass of rock, block or brick surrounding the fire which, in turn, warms the home.

J.R. wants to bury the air intake pipe under enough ground to warm the air some before it gets to the fire during the winter. Then, in summer, air from the same pipe could cool the masonry mass.

But J.R. can avoid that extra work. The air intake pipe needs to only bring outside air of any temperature, by the shortest route, directly to the combustion chamber. Prewarming the air does not significantly change oxygen content or density of the air at the temperatures involved in home heating. And using the air from the same pipe for cooling the mass in summer isn’t necessary. I’ll get to that in a minute.

These heating systems are a lot of work to build. There has to be a mass weighing a number of tons of mostly stone, brick or block that is skillfully put together. Beyond that the builder needs to understand and accommodate the various functions of the parts in order for it to be an efficient heater. That is why you don’t see many of them around.

Your multi-ton masonry mass will be sitting on a concrete slab that rests on the ground. In summer the mass will conduct its heat down through the slab into the ground. Ground temperature stays within a narrow range all year. Here in our part of New England ground temperature under our foundation slab is in the mid-50s in late summer and may cool to the mid-40s in late winter. So when the masonry mass is no longer being heated by a wood fire it cools to near ground temperature all by itself in a week or two and automatically air conditions your home all summer. Actually, you and everything in your home are radiating heat to the masonry mass which is conducting it into the ground under your home. Kind of mystical isn’t it?

Right now it is 88 degrees outside. But our inside temperature is a bit under 60. Plus our air vents all around the house are open. This apparent anomaly is because the masonry mass cools (and heats) the home with radiant heat, not convected heat as are most “modern” homes. The above photo shows about one third of the 47-ton masonry mass in our 3500 square foot home silently doing its work without electricity.

So, J.R., put away the shovel. Find BHM issue #90, page 46, and BHM issue #91, page 8, and you will have all the information about owner-built Masonry Mass Heating and Cooling Systems you will need along with many peripheral details you might like. I have built, if I remember right, about 20 various sized systems like this, learning things all along the way.

If you can’t find the BHM issues mentioned, write again.

J.R. Neumiller is a man after my own heart. He is willing to learn about new technology and, more important, willing to try some. He has explored straw bale homes and rejected them because they are hard to sell and some people make jokes about them. This is true of other unusual homes, like geodesic domes, round homes, log end construction, cob, adobe and other worthy methods shunned by banks, government and society in general. If you build such a home you better plan to live there for life.

J.R. chose not to build a log home because, although acceptable by banks and builders, they have a distinctive rustic look not popular with some people including Mrs. J.R.

He next looked into concrete block building and found problems with that but it brought him to the discovery of Insulating Concrete Forms.

I first saw this system used about 18 years ago. A mason friend of mine was building basement walls with ICFs. It is exciting to see. Styrofoam forms are locked together, sort of like Lego blocks. Reinforcing bars are inserted into notches in the foam and concrete is poured into the hollows. There was still the need for footers under the wall, and the inside and outside surfaces need to have some sort of finish applied to them. Parging comes to mind for some reason.

Just lately I saw basement walls being built with ICFs right in our own neighborhood. The Styrofoam forms have become more sophisticated as have concrete mixes that do a better job of filling the hollows in the forms.

J.R. wants to use this method to build his new home. ICFs have good properties that he recognized. Strength, insulation value and sound deadening are obvious. However, there are some other things to consider.

An ICF system is more expensive than block or poured concrete walls. Add to that the need for something to cover and protect the foam and it gets very pricey.

Finding a contractor to build walls up to house heights will be hard and, if you do find someone, he will charge a premium for “experimenting” and probably won’t guarantee his work.

The concrete can’t be poured into forms that tall. You will need a concrete pumper. I once had to hire a pumper. It cost $400…per hour!! Plus concrete.

Then there is the problem of working around the door and window openings. And, again, finishing the interior and exterior surfaces. I believe ICFs have promise and I think some smart people will see the advantages of this method and come up with a way to make it work for house walls one day. J.R. may be one of the pioneers in this field.

That is the bad news. The good news is, there are alternatives. First I think the ICF is by far the best basement wall system, if you want to have a basement. See BHM issue #102, page 26 for some different ideas.

House walls are a different matter. I have been using hardwood shakes on my homes for years. They have qualities you would appreciate. They add mass to the home, deaden outside noise, help the insulation in the walls work more efficiently in winter and summer, need no painting and require very little maintenance. The cost is low. They are a bit “rustic” but you have some very artistic options when putting them on your walls. Have Mrs. J.R. look at the pictures with my blogs and see what she thinks. BHM issue #88, page 8 tells all about it. You may have to search for that issue of the magazine. It is rare.

Given the direction of your research, J.R., there is a product you should check out. Here in New England we have a lot of Post and Beam homes going up. After the frame of one of these homes is put together the whole thing, walls and roof, are covered with panels that I think you will appreciate.

The outside layer is weatherproof waferboard that is ready for shingles or another exterior finish and roofing materials on the roof panels. The inside layer is green drywall, the water repellent kind, ready for paint. Bonded in between is seven inch thick Styrofoam. It probably comes in other thicknesses too. If you were to buy a supply of these panels you could build your whole house with them. They have excellent structural qualities. They come in a number of sizes. I helped put some 8′ by 16′ panels in place on a home near here. Window and door openings are cut with a long bladed Sawzall or a saber saw. Joints are keyed with 2×4s and builders foam.

You will need a Shop Vac to clean up the Styrofoam “snow” when cutting the panels but the window and door cutouts are usable as parts for outbuildings or other projects. No waste. When the cost of these panels is compared to balloon framing and sheathing costs, they are very competitive.

Wiring and installing plumbing in the walls is a challenge. Some ideas for doing those things can be found in BHM issue #106, page 29.

Heating one of these homes is very easy. The 2000 square foot home near here is easily overheated with a very small woodstove. They had to resort to the smallest heat pump available to do their heating and cooling. I suggested they use candles for heat. They did not think I was joking.

Google up some post and beam building companies near you and see who provides their panels and go from there. You may be more computer savvy than I am - many people are - and know more clever ways to find companies who make these panels. Keep us posted about your research, J.R.. I am sure there are many people who want to know more.

Regarding my previous blogs on brick, I learned something new when John Lowther sent a comment about soft bricks . I have come across soft bricks now and then and just assumed they came from a cooler part of the kiln and didn’t harden enough. John gave me a better explanation. Check his comment. Thank you, John.