This costs about twice as much as an existing modular home even if you count the labor as free.
Is it twice as good?
Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
181–190 of 223 posts
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#182Great idea, to design a house nowadays means you need to do a lot more mandatory calculations. For example a wooden beam between insulation has to be calculated, where a few years ago we could pretend they did not exist. Builders are now switching to some sort of engineered beams (two square beams connected with board). To offer this work in the public domain could reduce the cost significantly. However, watching the…
Looks mostly UK based from the projects section.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#183This costs about twice as much as an existing modular home even if you count the labor as free.
Is it twice as good?
It depends how much you value the carbon neutrality and the dark matter of real estate, the implication that you're living in a trendy new building not something that was trucked on site from a factory.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#184Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#185Why has this post dominated the top page for the last 18 hours? Reeks of astroturfing to me.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do in some sense but we call it something else like 45x120 or similar. That's not 2x4" but nor is a 2x4 actually 2 inches by 4 inches generally. But what we definitely don't do is stick build homes using 2x4s apart from interior walls. An exterior wall where I live would probably use 45x220mm studs and probably more wood as well for a total depth of 350+ mm.
We don't use that wood to build houses. The US is special in that respect.
Realize we have a very, very large country, and it's chock full of forest, so plenty of lumber resources to do such things. Other places use different materials/techniques/etc which are mostly based on what resources they have easy (read: cheap) access to.
Also not all of the US uses timber framing, for instance, in costal florida, it's not uncommon to have concrete walls that are framed with sheerwall inside, so they can survive a hurricane.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#187At the county level, you can download plans of pre-fab homes and sheds that were already approved/reviewed by an engineer... I got thousands of shed plans for free when I built mine
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps if you're prioritizing things other than maximally efficient use of materials? It seems like they're prioritizing standardization, especially of methods, more than almost anything else. AFAICT we have far more excess material than excess labor, so it doesn't seem particularly crazy to me?
Is that so? Materials went crazy expensive during Covid and didn’t come back down.
Lumber, for one, went back down to prepandemic pricing.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#189This looks cool, I'm just wondering if something like this would pass a building inspection in the US?
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#190There is a pretty cool project for a complete open source village: - https://www.opensourceecology.org/ Supposed to be all the machines you need to supply a whole village, made from low cost basic materials. I think it’s from 2014 not sure if it’s still being worked on or if anyone actually has used the blueprints in a real world scenario.
Interesting but I'm highly suspicious of his claim that industrial machines like tractors are planned for obsolescence. From those who operate such machines I've heard the exact opposite.