Do you or did you ever live in a geodesic dome, earth-sheltered, sod, Lustron™, octagon (modern or historic), poured-concrete, notably-old, notably-huge or etc. etc. home?
What is (or what was) that like? Fun? Cool? A pain-in-the-neck? Stories of any sort would be appreciated.
My in-laws live in a raised octogon with really high ceilings. Overall the octogon is causing no issues.
It is a pretty cool place. Open floorplan helps.
The high windows for the living/dining room were storm damaged and nearly impossible to get to for replacement, so that’s an issue.
What makes it “raised?” Is it on stilts/ posts?
In college, I lived in a sustainability demonstration home. It was an on-campus single-family house that the college was trying to demolish to make room for new construction, but a group of students salvaged and retrofitted it into a living museum.
It had a composting toilet that would very slowly and stinkily turn human poop into fertilizer, solar PV panels, solar hot water, a tiny graywater marsh, a permaculture garden, recycled attic insulation made out of blue jeans, earthern gardenworks and stairs, a yurt, cobb buildings, earthern ovens, a bicycle-powered blender, a fleet of human-powered generators, etc. It was an attempt to bring some of the 70s-style hippie-dippie living back, with a modern flair. The idea wasn’t to detach from modern life but to try to live less impactfully.
The remarkable thing about that place is that it was entirely student-funded, student-led, and student-run. It was a nonprofit whose leaders were democratically elected and then lived there for a year at a time, sharing the house with two others live-in directors and a dozen or so student employees during the day. On Fridays, a couple dozen volunteers would show up to help around the house and the grounds. New projects all started as student ideas, vetted and then built by other students, with minimal oversight. We had large leeway to play with power tools of all sorts, with mostly a blind eye from the administration except for the most egregious of safety violations. Most everything actually kinda-sorta worked, just not very well. Nothing was up to code.
A lot of faux-neo-pagan harvest festivals were celebrated there, with much bluegrass and free food grown partially on-site and from nearby farms. Workshops were held on everything from home solar installations to vermicomposting to roleplaying earthworm sex… that was, uh, slippery. Students were paired up with each other, rubbed lotion on themselves, and then squirmed on top of and around one another while being tied together inside a big red ribbon.
Fun times…
It is a full story up on posts.
The lower story has taken flood damage twice since they’ve been there. The ground level is basically a garage, workshop and storage.
My home has a flat roof, which I think is pretty cool…
What’s up there? Gravel on tar?
I suppose it’s tar. It looks like the strips laid out (on tar I guess) at the top of this blog (same as the preview image):
My current house “breathes.”
Our house in Portland was a renovated 1904 house. We had to do some foundation work on it, but the framing was solid. It was far from level and plumb, however.
I used to stay at my brother’s house when I was a kid. He had no running water and an outhouse and an oil heater for winter. I remember helping him haul creek water so they could bathe, wash dishes, etc., and man, was that outhouse cold in the Alaskan winter.
When we first moved to Anchorage, my parents rented a two-story log house. I believe it had a furnace for heat and it stayed quite warm in the winter without having any insulation other than the logs.
Probably not as interesting as a lot of other homes, but I found it interesting.
I attended college in the late 1980s, here in Ohio. But my co-op job was in Maryland. In Maryland I rented a room from a couple who lived in a beautiful home in a rural area. They had it custom-built in 1978. It was single story, no basement, and 4800 square feet of living area. To this day, it’s the largest single story home I have been in. There was a sunken “great room” in the center, four bathrooms, pocket doors, imported ceramic tile, and a central vacuum system.
I grew up in a house with windows that were what’s called cathedral windows or lancet windows, which are the shape of windows in many churches, but, no, it wasn’t a church.
Did it have a you-are-here map?
Was it old? Many gothic style houses from the mid to late 19th century had such windows.
My father was a contractor. He remodeled an old barn into the house I grew up in.
Our hot water heater was salvaged from a hotel. We never ran out of hot water.
The kitchen, the laundry room, and and the guest bathroom all had floor drains.
The electrician who wired the house used scraps from commercial projects. In the thirty years my family lived there, we flipped a circuit breaker once. When we had brownouts, it was the power company’s fault.
The house my family lived in for the first 7 years of my life was built sometime in the early 1800’s. It had hand hewn cypress beams with wooden pegs and square nails for fasteners. By the time we lived in it electricity and running water had been added, but we still had the old outhouse in the backyard. The fireplace originally opened into two separate rooms divided by a wall, but the side my bedroom was on had been sealed up so only the side facing the living room was used. I always thought it was a cool place to live.
It was on a farm. There was a plaque in the barn that said it was built in 1867. I presume the house was built about the same time.
When we lived in Japan in the mid ‘60s we rented a house from a person who had taught at UC Berkeley and built the house he would have liked to build in the hills in California. It was perched at the top of a couple of very steep hills on a gravel road and on approach all you would see of the house at street level was a metal gate and a paved courtyard with a rollup garage door. Park in the garage and you had the option of either going up the normal outside staircase (there was a 1.75 story retaining wall keeping everything from sliding down into the road) or taking a circular stair that came up through a round tower that opened up at the front door. On the second level was most of the living area with a long rectangle of lawn and shrubbery that was overlooked by a bank of sliding glass doors all along the side. Kitchen, family room and two Western style bedrooms on that floor with one Western style bath and one Japanese style bath. Then in back was a small maid’s quarters and the Japanese style bedroom I lived in, with a jack & jill bath between them but that was reserved solely for our live in housekeeper’s use. There was a small Japanese style garden back there, framed one one side with a continuation of the walkway/staircase that came up from the street, the back was another one story retaining wall and the other side had an enclosed stairway that led up from the kitchen to the third level. Outside my room was a nicely set up and maintained Japanese style garden that nobody but me ever went into–Misuko-san could have gone out there but once she found out there were snakes she nailed her window shut. She had the worst snake phobia I’ve ever seen, probably not helped by my reptile loving/catching personality lol.
Third level was a big formal living room, also with a bank of floor to ceiling glass windows on one side, back and sides had no windows since there wasn’t much of a view that way. The view over the valley was stunning, though, with the train line running far below but still in earshot and the other side of the narrow valley rising up into wooded hills on the other side. The living room had a built in wet bar and its own half bath and was a great setup for entertaining. It was also absolutely awesome when big thunderstorms would roll through and we’d turn off all the lights to watch the lightning flash.
True to Japanese sensibilities, the house was considered “too old” at some point and by the time Google Earth had added satellite pics of Japan the house had been replaced by something nowhere near as cool. Shame, it was an amazing house. We got into so much trouble one day–the roofs were all smooth metal, sensible for the climate, and we got a ladder and climbed up onto the roof of the enclosed staircase with some wax paper and used it as a slide all afternoon. Drove the housekeeper mental with the noise and we got roundly castigated once mom and dad got home.
In the ‘70s I lived in the James Blake House (c. 1661) in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.
My ex and I were graduate student live-in caretakers. I still remember fondly the solidity of that house and realizing that I was a minuscule dot in a long line of people who had been born, made love and died inside its massively thick, sturdy walls.
Grew up in this house. After my dad left to work in another state, it sat unsold for years in the 80’s asking $50K.