It’s interesting how an idea or bit of information can lead to research on an idea, whose research leads to another idea, which leads to another . . . Well, you get the idea. You’ll find the research and the work in progress in the blog portion of this site. The static design pages are listed in the menu under Pages.
I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time researching building methods. If you want to read the whole first part of the saga, visit my original house plan site. I’ve had to back away from that plan because of health issues. I cannot afford to have someone else do all the work, and with my original awesome house plan I could not do the work that would have been left up to me, so I’ve had to retrench and rethink. I have put a lot of hours, thought and research into this new plan, and I’m very pleased. I feel it’s not only something I can build myself, it’s something I can afford to build myself and something in which I look forward to living. That, in itself, adds its own charm.
So share my journey with me. Read through the pages listed in the sidebar in the order they’re presented and then read the blog starting with December 2006 and you’ll have a good idea where I’m at and how I got to this point.
Hj! I just found your very interesting blog as I watched the goings-on in the Papercreters forum. I have been doing a roughly similar garden planning process akin to your most thoroughly documented blog, only I am a “slow-blogger” type, mainly reading others’ posts, and occasionally trying to make a post of my own in Blogger.
I am very intrigued by your grinding machine for eps, as I want to build a series of raised garden beds, using precast blocks. It looked [and still does] like an expensive idea, but after many hours of daydreaming and reading about hypertufa, papercrete, and lots of arcane crap about cementious materials, fiber reinforcement, water-reducing admixes, pozzolans and the like, I chanced to see a PDF about your eps grinder. Shazam! A great way to re-use Styrofoam I’ve been storing up for no definite future use! I will find some old electric motor to hook onto a belt-driven chipper cylinder, and maybe make/find a collecting box to catch the “snow”. I read your anti-static dishwash solution advice, and thought “Wow, I was thinking that should work just fine!” I will probably start some sort of ACTUAL garden later this summer, making some molds later on. Could I please ask you a question or two about your epscrete experiences from time to time?
It’s amazing stuff! I am not kidding, amazing! If you have any questions or need more detail on what I’ve got and have done, let me know.