Dope. All hail Bucky!
The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
201–210 of 317 posts
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#202This is awesome. I especially love his focus on reducing the complex down to the very simple. He put a lot of work into simplifying the design and the payoff was huge - only 3 shapes make up the whole thing! From the article: "The three shapes we derived above amount to a remarkable simplification in fabrication and construction. We have decimated the complexity of the dome." "Decimated" is the perfect word for it. H…
Actually, "decimated" is not the perfect word for it. He's done much better than mere decimation! (Decimated means "reduced by 1/10th" ... not, as is popularly believed, "reduced to 1/10th")
Either meaning is within an order of magnitude, so if we assume a spherical house...
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Wasting capital on rent" may be the worst nonsense in our financial folklore. Always run the numbers. Rent vs. mortgage calculators and spreadsheets are readily available. Understand the factors they use, and perhaps tweak for your own needs and priorities. I'm glad that I did, as I completely dodged the disaster that was the housing bubble as a result -- my rent always looked like a killer deal compared to nutso ho…
I also sat out the housing bubble and its insane prices, but now we have a house we love and very small mortgage. Of course capital invested during a bubble is wasted, but that doesn't mean all investment in that asset class is a bad idea.
But saidajigumi didn't say that buying is always a bad idea. He said "always run the numbers."
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
10x10 is half the floor space of this dome.
Yes. The structure I priced out was also only 8 feet tall. About half the cost -- if I recall -- was doors, windows, and skylights, and the other half was the walls, ceiling, and floor. So you'd expect a structure with roughly double the surface area to be roughly $3000 instead of $2000. Depending on material choices, you would probably end up with a cost of between $2000 and $4000 by the time you put the last coat o…
And if you hit up your local Recycling yard you can often acquire a number of windows and doors at very economical prices. I once stayed at a house that had an entire wall made of doors of varying styles, salvaged building materials can lend a lot of character to a structure.
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, as a father to three... all I could think of when reading the article was " The bliss of ignorance a 20-something, single kid-less person has... if only I could live in a Dome with no restroom "!
Well, ahem, you may be aware that in some places in the world some families have plenty of kids and no restrooms in their houses. Actually there is quite a lot of them. Restrooms is not the problem here, the problem is this focus on frameless structure. Why not just doing a tent, like in so many traditional cultures? It must be easier to build and may even be more pleasing to the eyes.
Exactly. My church helps build inexpensive (~$10,000) homes in central America, and this looks like an interesting option.
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Why is rent wasting money? It's isn't. The idea that it's wasting money, or that you're paying someone else's mortgage, or whatever other argument is thrown out there are part of one of the biggest financial misconceptions going. Do the cost/benefit of renting vs ownership, accounting for maintenance, taxes, interest rates, macro-economic conditions and whatever else and the costs should be very similar. Of course,…
> The idea that it's wasting money, or that you're paying someone else's mortgage, or whatever other argument is thrown out there are part of one of the biggest financial misconceptions going. That I believed this was assumed, and that I was comparing _renting to purchasing a house_ was also assumed (but probably not so clear!). I was comparing renting to what the dome-builder was doing. With that said, renting vs. o…
Sure, if you're looking at the final dollar amount.
Other factors need to come into play when you own a home. My rent was about $1000/month with utilities for about 1000 sq. feet. I now pay a mortgage of $1375/month + about $75 in average monthly utilities. But with that I get a home with 1600 sq. feet living space, not including the finished attic or the unfinished basement and the 7500 sq. foot lot I now have to mow, minus the garage and house space. Per sq. foot of space, you're likely to do really well, if space is what you need.
There are three main reasons I bought: 1) I have a young daughter and I thought she might like a yard. 2) I'm tired of the noise from apartments and 3) the interest rates were about as close to free as I think they'll get for a long time and I plan to stick around here for at least the next decade or so.
In your case, you might not need the space or want the hassle of maintenance.
Personally I think making the rent vs. buy argument into an investment argument is ultimately worthless. There are better investments out there, like your time. Shelter is not an investment, it's a basic human need. Buy/rent exactly what you need and nothing more. It's a lifestyle choice. Put your money to work in real markets.
Living in a geodesic dome will probably ruin your social life, but if you don't need a social life, great!
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that happen with non permanent structures? I don't count the problems as ignored. They're actually not relevant for the intended use case.
From the article: > If I want to spend my time writing blog posts, exploring new programming languages, and other things that I want to do but I am unlikely to get paid for, it’s helpful to opt out of certain common expenses. Housing is a major expense that is ripe for pruning. I'd say "the intended use case" here is clearly to replace your primary residence, which is both what makes the project interesting and what…
You can replace your primary residence and at the same time change your lifestyle expectation.
From the article: "If you are considering a canvas dome, teepee, or yurt you should consider building a frameless dome as well."
I'd say that if you're considering replacing your primary residence with a teepee, you're looking at certain lifestyle expectation that don't necessarily include building codes.
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, "decimated" is not the perfect word for it. He's done much better than mere decimation! (Decimated means "reduced by 1/10th" ... not, as is popularly believed, "reduced to 1/10th")
Either meaning is within an order of magnitude, so if we assume a spherical house...
Only if you're the worst rounder in the world.
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
they're cheap to acquire, but long-term, not so good. They're also very flimsy, so everything sort-of goes at once. Yes, you can spend a lot more on one and get nicer finishes, but the end state is the floor sags and none of the doors shut.
It depends on what you mean by long-term and probably how well you take care of it. Growing up, I lived in one for years with no issues. So did my best friend, for even longer (at least a decade, no issues with sagging or warping). And this was in the rainy, wet Pacific Northwest. I dare say they are better built than the flimsy plastic tent we saw linked in the OP.
$36,000 / 120 months = $300/mo. If it lasts 10 years, that's a pretty good ROI.
Re: The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
#210it would be nice if you could carry this in your pocket and you add water to the tiny pocket sized cylinder labelled "Capsule Corp." and yell "HOY POY" and it will spring to life, complete with furnitures, your computer and everything.
Arthur Weasley had something a lot like that ...