100-Mile Housing: The $250 Home
NOVEMBER 8, 2007 - My trip to see The Sanctuary, a “100-mile housing” complex near Grand Forks, was one of the most memorable in a summer’s travel through the wide world of localism. While I was there, the Sanctuary collaborative was hard at work digging a foundation. Well, here’s the latest news . . . -JBM
The ‘100-Mile Housing’ Home Dome you saw starting has been a joyful, creative and satisfying building process. Sean moved in today, less than two months from the time we started. His original, 22-year-old house burned down on April Fools Day, we began building the new dome on Labour Day, and he moved in on Halloween - why fight existing celebrations when we can join them?
The Home Dome has an interior of 450 square feet (including the loft), and the attached greenhouse has approximately 200 square feet for a total of 650 square feet of new construction. This is attached by bottle-and-cob hallways to the existing ‘laundry’ and ‘library’ structures to equal a grand total of over 1,800 square feet of connected, undercover space. The total construction cost to date is $250.00, which covers gas used in the truck for collecting the clay and new electrical materials such as wire, boxes and fixtures. The rest of the materials were free - with lots of healthy labour expended hauling dead or windfall trees, peeling poles, mixing cob and putting it all together. I think that comes out to a spot under 14 cents a square foot - THAT’S ‘affordable housing’.
Due to the exclusive use of our existing solar electric, wood heat and gravity feed water systems there are no further monthly expenses to consider. The walls are rock and cob (a mixture of local clay, sand and chopped straw) to the 4′ level and sunk that same depth into the earth, topped with cordwood and cob walls. The final 8′ diameter of domed roof is a recycled satellite dish covered in sawdust (collected from the last RCMP Musical Ride). Excluding the electrical components, everything used in the construction is either natural and indigenous or locally recycled and from within 100-miles of our site - actually, mostly within 2 miles.
We are proud of the old wood heater we scrounged and surrounded with a one-foot wall of loose, fist-sized rocks contained in cob-mortared rock walls to the top of the stove. The mass creates amazing heat storage. This is augmented by a rusty, 6″ cast iron sewer pipe donated by City Works from their dump site (23 km distance from site) that we have installed as our chimney to capture and radiate an amazing amount of escaping BTU’s into the dome.
Another few weeks and Sean will be growing all his salad fixin’s in the attached greenhouse while enjoying the cold winter basking in a warm dome finishing the loft, attending to interior details and relaxing.
