Ned Harr

I believe, with the exception of toys and some of the bottom-barrel cheapo stuff from China, most musical instruments are "durable goods" and are intended to be playable so long as they are in decent shape. A 100 year-old instrument hasn't gotten frail the way a 100 year-old person has. Just a bit dusty maybe.

I think it's easy to look at a rigid metal box and say "all the hard stuff is already done!" but I think the hard stuff when it comes to construction is mostly in the little details where one component or piece of material meets another, especially if they are not combinations you have optimized your skills and tools around.

Shipping containers work really well when used as big storage boxes with doors at one end. As you try to make them incrementally more like houses the challenges pile up, and in my experience working in them, few things are as easily installed in a shipping container as they would be in conventional construction. So I'd say plan for everything to be harder and cost more.

I watched a video series where a guy showed how he converted a shipping container into a small office. He cut penetrations for utilities and a single window, sprayfoamed for insulation, and finished the interior in plywood with surface-run electrical outlets & switches using metal boxes and EMT conduit.

It looked like he struggled to cut the penetrations and flash the window. This was a very capable and skillful guy in the video using probably excellent tools (Youtube channel is called Essential Craftsman) and even he ran into problems and had to redo stuff. He said it was due to being old but to me it read as a warning that a less experienced person of any age would have had an even harder time than he did.

Containers can save money on structure

The word "can" is doing a lot of work there. I could easily envision scenarios where they don't save you any money even just on the structure. Conventional stick-framing can be done extremely inexpensively and quickly, for a structure that size.

Where they shine:

Faster build time

It's less time before you have a roof over your head I suppose, but I think preparation and experience are going to be the limiting factors in terms of speed to completion.

Don't get me wrong, I think shipping container construction is cool, and I'm happy people are trying it, but it looks to me like it is deceptively challenging.

This is good info everyone, thanks. I have a vision of building either a Russian fireplace, rmh, pizza oven, or some hybrid of these out of cob or Adobe, in a central location within my house, and was wondering whether it would require regular replastering. Sounds like it wouldn’t, which is great.

I have heard that there is more or less annual maintenance required for cob and Adobe; specifically they need to be replastered every year.

Is this true no matter what--like if I build a cob structure that is entirely inside the envelope of my house? Or is it only based on the idea that the outside elements, or differentials between outside and inside conditions, degrade the plaster of cob/Adobe exterior walls (both on their exterior and interior surfaces) thus requiring the constant repair?

Coydon Wallham wrote:I'm guessing at the motivation here- is this a south facing slope where you are seeking greater solar input to reach the taller wall under the high point of the roof with?

Partly that, and partly so one can look out from inside and see lots of outside instead of lots of ceiling. There are a few other considerations in there as well but those are the two main ones.

Given access to enough resources, practically any 'design flaw' can be compensated for. But if designing from scratch, why not utilize the best ideals from the start?

I hear ya. I think all architecture is gonna fight physics in some way; nature wants to put your materials back the way they were, but humans want to put those materials into an arrangement that lets us feel like we're taking a break from nature or at least from part of nature. Even the most aikido-ed architecture is going to eventually leak and crumble. Thus all architecture is bound with technology--that is, the expression of intent in opposition to the received environment. The question is how hard are you willing to fight to get what you want.

In this case, I don't think it would be all that much harder to keep the lowest levels of a slope-built house dry, it just requires the application of a few time-tested engineering tricks. We're not making toilets swirl backward, and we're not trying to support a space station, we're just building stuff like retaining walls, putting down barriers under the backfill behind those walls, and maybe installing some french drains or digging some swales. These aren't costless and they aren't guarantees but they're known to work, they aren't difficult or super expensive, and they'd likely be needed no matter which way the roof is sloping, given the same building site.

I think I once heard a doctor say most of what helps your headache when you take Tylenol is the glass of water. So, if I feel pain and I can't directly link it to some kind of injury, I first drink water. Just to eliminate the possibility that I'm simply experiencing dehydration (unlikely since I typically drink 100+oz per day, but hey).

My take on what Brenda is saying is, "don't build on mountainsides". I am not seeing how the type of construction or water mitigation techniques would matter, it's all gonna get washed downhill if there is a once-in-a-millennium rainstorm.

Watched the video last night.

$300 was the estimated cost just for the materials to build the walls, translated into our money since the specific home in question was built a thousand years ago. The home itself did not cost $300, nor would a comparable home built today using the same methods and materials.

The main content of the video is about how natural building methods like Adobe and cob have been systematically suppressed by various boards, committees, lobbies, etc. each pursuing their own financial incentives.

The video ends on a positive note, that spreading the word and experimenting with these methods is gradually beginning to reverse the trend.

But I think this is ironic, because in my opinion few things are as harmful to the cause of promoting natural building (or really any cause) as being deceptive about its costs.

I also disagree with the multiple times the video said that rules against natural building methods had "nothing to do with safety". Residential building codes are indeed partially compromised by financial incentives, but not totally, and I believe those codes are at least partly responsible for the decrease in house fires, structural failures, etc. that used to be relatively common. We should never take safety and structural integrity for granted. There are other parts of the world where amateur building prevails, and in those parts of the world build problems affecting safety are relatively abundant.

In that regard, the video falls prey to black and white thinking as well, which in my opinion is another stumbling block on the path to promoting natural building.

So over all, I'd say the video was interesting, and I was happy to see the information about the lady who is helping people build with Adobe, the three US states where it's easy to do so, but its assessment of cost and its conclusions about building codes were not conducive to the goal of getting more people to actually build with, or be able to build with, Adobe and other natural building methods.

That video's been in my "Watch Later" queue for a week or so. I believe $0 to heat, but I don't buy $300 to build. Guess I'll have to watch it and find out.

I am an ignoramus and can explain nothing. I comment only to note that I had an acquaintance whose family owned funeral homes, who had grown up working in them, and on that basis (somehow?) he advised me never to use bar soap, for sanitary reasons. I didn't heed his advice, because I still use Dove white bar soap in the shower, though for convenience purposes I use liquid soaps everywhere else.