Don’t Try This Recycling Trick at Home!
I confess that, back in the ’80s, I might have done the same thing this couple did. I remember reading Mother Earth News and Practical Homeowner magazine articles about folks who collected discarded materials to use in their existing homes or to build a new one. Take that man in Colorado, for example, who had a materials stash big enough to build a whole, nice-sized house for only $5000. That was cool! Since then, however, I’ve learned why I would have regretted building a house resembling what you see below.
I confess that, back in the ’80s, I might have done the same thing this couple did. I remember reading Mother Earth News and Practical Homeowner magazine articles about folks who collected discarded materials to use in their existing homes or to build a new one. Take that man in Colorado, for example, who had a materials stash big enough to build a whole, nice-sized house for only $5000. That was cool! Since then, however, I’ve learned why I would have regretted building a house resembling what you see below.
According to the Inhabitat article where I read about this foolishness, the couple in the photo above “take their dreams very seriously.” Unfortunately, they didn’t take them seriously enough to learn a little building science, or even the lessons of those who made similar mistakes in the ’70s and ’80s.
But that’s fine. I know a thing or two about learning to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool.
My prediction about their ‘love nest’
My prediction is that this couple will either abandon their ‘love nest,’ as Inhabitat called it, or be forced to spend serious money fixing it. Why? Because this house will be:
- Too cold in winter. West Virginia gets cold, and single pane windows do little to stop the home’s heat from moving right out. Also, from the other photos in the article, it looks like the rustic wood walls may have no insulation at all.
- Too hot in winter, spring, summer, and fall. If they have a view of the sunset when they sit in that open window, then the house is likely to bake on sunny days. Even on warmer winter days, all that direct solar gain could overheat the small space.
- Too leaky. I’d be very surprised if they haven’t already mopped up water from that window quilt with no overhang. A good thunderstorm blowing through will probably…well…blow right through. I’m sure the place leaks a lot of air, too, making it drafty and uncomfortable.
Perhaps they thought, as I did in the past, that it’s good to have lots of windows facing the Sun so you can take advantage of that free, passive solar heating in the winter. As Martin Holladay wrote in his article, Solar Versus Superinsulation, that contest was won long ago by superinsulation. His quote from Steve Bliss, an editor at Solar Age magazine in the early ’80s, is illuminating:
For one of my first articles for Solar Age, I interviewed two college professors living in a solar house in the Boston suburbs,” Bliss recalled. “When I got there, they were sitting in the house freezing — they were wearing down booties and down vests. They were suing their architect, who had used solar glazing formulas developed for houses in the Southwest.
So if you want to scrounge materials to build your own rustic cabin in the woods, go for the insulation and stay far away from the single pane windows.
Kudos to them for doing something, but…
I’m not trying to belittle the couple who built the house. They’ll discover their mistakes quickly enough—if they haven’t already—and get some valuable building science lessons firsthand. I admire the couple for going out and building the house. They made their dream come to life and will probably make some good memories there. They’re also going to learn why people say to be careful what you wish for.
The real culprit here is Inhabitat for promoting this house as something admirable without a word about the design flaws. They’ve gotten nearly 1000 likes and over 100 shares by posting a photo of the house on their Facebook page, thus spreading the nonsense further to people who write things like, “Perfect! I love it” and “my dream.”
And this from an organization whose tag line is “design will save the world.”
Related articles
A Good Window Is Still a Poor Wall
Rain Barrels, Chickens, and Walking the Sustainable Living Talk
Naked People Need Building Science
Photo from Inhabitat article on recycled window love nest.
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I would not want to be
I would not want to be sitting there, in a strong wind, when all that glass comes falling down!
You know, I think about the
You know, I think about the pros and cons of salvage a lot, because in our panelizing plant we are trying to be zero-landfill and that means trying to find homes for the buildng materials we have left over that can’t get recycled. Things like sizeable house wrap scraps or sizeable XPS scraps…on the one hand, someone can surely USE those! On the other hand, if somebody used those, they’ll end up having lots of seams that have to be properly taped, lapped, flashed, etc, and having all of those seams will probably negatively impact the building performance even if somebody does take the time to do them correctly. Perhaps I should contact these folks and see if they could use some scrap XPS to insulte their walls. Surely, surely this house was an “under the radar” house, not something that a building inspector ever laid eyes on.
As a young hippie myself, I get it though. Some of my young hippie friends recently built a “dirt bag” house (read, an earth-ship style house with bags of dirt as the bricks) under-the-radar out on the outsirks of town, and a piece of me wanted to join them. Rather than expect the house to be comfortable, temperature-wise, it’s more like hey we’re living closer to nature and not trying to keep our environment in a strict temperature range. What a great environmentalist ideal.
The problem with that is that most people aren’t willing to do that forever, but just for a while. And then your salvage built house becomes…more salvage. At least it is salvage you learn something from for a while.
Oh boy does this bring back
Oh boy does this bring back memories when I was involved in a “back to the land” community of earth sheltered housing late 70’s/early 80’s. We thought we had it all figured out: make a building shell out of ferrocement (with the idea you could do it yourself in stages), slap some sealant and insulation on it, leave enough openings for naturual light, cover the whole shebang with dirt…Mother Earth News paradise!
Looking back, I’m glad I got no further than gouging a big hole into a gently sloping hillside in order to build my dream dome home. A neighbor down the way went all the way, put dirt on top, and was shocked when his supposed “monolithic shell” cracked in a dozen or more places. Turns out that throwing mud onto a rebar and e-lath shell in various stages (i.e. different days) leaves a ton of cold joints and anything but a monolithic structure. It was an object lesson for me; that pie-in-the-sky dreams don’t always translate well to the harsh world of physics. What I did not fully grasp in those days is how it was laying a foundation for my ever evolving understanding of good building science.
Stephen M.
Stephen M.: That could well be a concern. Looking at it from the outside, it seems that all those windows may just be nailed to each other, but if you click through to the Inhabitat article, you’ll see some decent sized lumber backing them.
Leigha D.: Excellent points. I hate throwing stuff away, but as you state so clearly, sometimes trying to save every little scrap leads to problems.
John P.: Sorry to be such a downer, dude. ;~)
Roxanne: Thanks!
Cameron T.: Yep. Physics rules. Structural engineers do fill a valuable role.
This looks a bit like a
This looks a bit like a chicken coop I made from odds and ends when I was a kid. I just now realized that if I had put more glass in mine I could have gone directly to roast chicken.