Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004Winter Blues
So, I'm lying in bed, half asleep, and I'm thinking to myself, I wish I could have a Real Man's Day some day. A day that sounds like the prelude to The Barber of Seville -but not performed by some whimpy Andre Rieu sort of orchestra. No. This is an ass-kicking German orchestra, humming with Aryan determination like the engine of a Mercedes Benz. An orchestra where the horn section is composed mostly of guys named Otto -and they've got places to GO, dammit! And it's either PAST you, or THROUGH you! Now THAT would be a day!
And then I painfully roll over, my body feeling like one of those action figures whose internal tension string has somehow snapped leaving the limbs all limp, and open blurry puffy eyes to see the dull red glow of a clock in a dimly lit room. And I realize this is not that day. This is another typical Winter day. A day that sounds like any Bjork tune chosen at random.
As you may have guessed, I don't tolerate Winters too well, hence the lack of updates to this sight of late. My work pace suffers greatly in the cold months, thus there has not been much to report of late. And there has been no feedback as yet to the Final Project section.
Recently, I did some more research into the concept of adapting ISO shipping containers for non-toxic housing use. Many readers of this site have shown great interest in this and offered helpful suggestions. But the concept remains frustrating. While the whole rest of the globe seems to be able to use these with no particular difficulty, finding places that can do these adaptations at any reasonable price here in the US seems to be impossible. And volunteer help for this seems rarer still.
I explored a new container home design that seemed to me to be very economical. One of the more involved -and therefor expensive- tasks in the conversion of a container is the cutting and framing of discrete window and door openings, especially in the corrugated steel plate of standard dry shipping containers. Some European architects working in container housing concepts have found a solution to this problem by employing designs which limit all functional openings to just the ends where the container doors normally are. That way there is no special welding work required. One simply uses windows and sliding panel doors the full area of the container end set into the primary frame of the container. Framing these becomes a simple task of bolting in place standard window and door framing profiles. And one can off-set them to allow the original container doors to be retained and closed for easier transport, as security doors, or as shades. Using this approach I arrived at a simple home design where six or more twenty foot long containers are joined side-by-side, their intervening wall plates removed to allow for larger clear-span rooms in pairs and triplets, and both ends open and framed for full area window panels in acrylic or dual-panel sliding doors. A few of the intervening container walls would be retained to make separate rooms, with four foot wide sections cut out on one end as doorways. The small gap left between the wall plates of the linked containers at these points would be exploited to host tall thin panel pocket doors. Five containers side-by-side approximate the length of a forty foot long container thus I imagined the use of one or two of these, stripped down to just roof and floor, connected to the face of the twenty foot series to serve as simple porches or decks. With six twenty foot containers one would have a simple home of 960 square feet divided into two double-wide rooms for living room and bedroom and two single-wide rooms at either end for kitchenette, utility, and bathroom.
Thinking I had figured out some uniquely economical approach, I contact some container modifying companies in the areas I wanted to move and discovered that this apparently could not be done, even in the smaller configuration, for less than $100,000! Trying to figure out why something so simple should be so expensive, I contacted the well known container mod architects Jones Partners Group in California who seemed to be of the opinion that this was actually pretty cheap and less than the average cost for housing in the US! $100 a square foot is cheap? Am I living on a different planet from everyone else? You can get a house hand-fabricated from tropical hardwood in Bali and shipped to the US and that only costs $35-$40 a square foot delivered and assembled! It just doesn't seem to make much sense to me when container homes are commonly considered poverty-level housing in most of the rest of the world. Once again, another foray into the container housing concept ends in frustration.
But all is not lost for this idea. This week I stumbled onto a company called Global Portable Buildings Inc. in California which is now offering a product they call the ChuckHouse. This product is an adapted Hi-Cube shipping container offered at a starting cost of purportedly $12,000 -finished, wired, and including a PV power system installed. Sure, this is still in the area of $75 per square foot but this is the finished cost. And, mind you, that's with a BRAND NEW container. But what really makes this product amazing is the company's claim that the ChuckHouse is finished entirely with non-toxic materials throughout. They seem to even have gone to the extent of using gel-cell batteries for the PV system -which, of course, precludes the outgassing associated with cheaper deep-cycle batteries. This is the first time I've heard ANY portable/prefab building maker ever show the slightest concern for that. It has never been a marketing point for these people before.
Whether this product is all it's cracked up to be remains to be seen. The interior photos show that they are finished with a veneer wall panel that could be just as easily be conventional toxic materials as not. There's no obvious indicator. So I'm waiting to see if I can get the manufactures to disclose a complete listing of all their materials. Also, they do not seem to offer these in a configuration that can be linked together into larger buildings, and even a forty foot container is pretty cramped accommodations for a permanent home. If this bears out, this may be the ready-made housing solution many EIs have been looking for. Right now there are EIs stuck in far cruder dwellings that cost as much as $40,000.
I've also had more interest lately in the Bali-T house from Tony's T-Houses -mentioned in my Gallery articles. I've learned that the Indonesian ironwood used for these homes is apparently much more tolerable of different climates than I had thought before. So, contrary to my earlier opinion, these may be usable in a much wider range of locations than just Hawaii and Florida. But the design of the homes does still impose limits. There is still apparently no practical way to insulate these structures except in terms of roof insulation and the use of things like quilted wall and ceiling hangings. And adding things like radiant floor heating seems impractical. So they will still be limited in use to places that see no really cold temperatures anytime of the year -except where they are placed within a second outer structure that can offer some additional insulation potential.
I have, in fact, been considering such an idea. Unlike the traditional Japanese homes from which they were derived, the Bali-T lacks a roofed outer-walkway structure. Every night, and in colder months, the residents of traditional Japanese homes installed a series of heavy wood panels along this outer walkway which provided security as well as an additional barrier against wind and cool temperatures. A Bali-T could achieve something similar by extending the edge of the roof line a bit and installing large triple-wall polycarbonate greenhouse glazing panels between the ground and the roof edge. This would create a trombe-wall type of solar gain effect on southerly facing sides of the structure and would be a clever way to integrate a greenhouse into the home. But solar gain by this may be far too great in desert climates and, of course, these corrugated glazing panels do not offer the clear view of windows. If one can moderate this solar gain better -perhaps by using translucent PV panel walls instead of just the polycarbonate- it might be a strong possibility for widening the range of potential locations. But, while their square foot cost is fairly low, the unit cost for these Bali-Ts is still rather high and since they cannot be stockpiled in parts incrementally this strategy is probably still out of my sole reach.
