Idaho modern oldtimer builds underground & solar $50 houses

the only reason I'm going to bring some shoes is because we've got the first part of this we've got to go through some semi rough country we're going to take you up to the original 50 and $500 house first and then we'll see the spectacular one so this is all your land up in here yeah it's a quarter of a mile by a quarter of a mile so you came out here looking for a place to build you know to buy yep you want to build your own place yep and did you know you're gonna go underground um no I didn't at first this is kind of a wild bear area this land this county here is two-thirds National Forest well my house my original house is right up there about 50 yards now this this little one that your daughter's buy that house cost $15 to build when I was in grammar school I was drawing plans for homesteads the reason I went underground was I was freezing in this little shack and it wasn't worth insulating I tried to figure what could I build that would be quick easy cheap and warm above all I guess that's a mushroom I thought maybe it was their scat bear scat is black like that and we've had our share of bears up here yeah reminds the Bears of it too unfortunately this is a 500 dollar house we dug this by hand and built the whole thing in in three months here in the northwest we don't have any Sun in the wintertime you know but I could still get just enough light to write by and to read by oh yeah sure I lived in this for over 30 years your eyes will get adjusted here pretty quick you still get a lot of light oh yeah that's that's the uphill patio and now remember the the Sun is going to go down pretty soon so we're not getting as much light as we could in here this cost only $500 but how much time I mean a lot of digging or yeah we dug dug everything by hand and now the lumber that we used in the original house was all from thrown-away lumber from the mills that's how I could build a place for $50 you know this over here is kind of an invention of mine I call this the barbecue windows the barbecue windows you can stand inside in hot weather and you're cool because you're in here you can stand in here in cold weather and stay warm because you're in here and you can cook outside and the smoke goes up that's the fire area right here yeah yeah sure we you know I had a great over it and but you don't worry about burning down your house no no underground houses do not do not burn very well so that's that's a nice thing and this has always been my bed area here and there I called the use of fire windows because I used to have campfires out there at night you see that polyethylene that's where the last bear who got in came in through one night I heard a bear out there I guess I want to open that window and something was stopping it from opening the bear had been out there that closed only this section in here was in the original 50/50 dollar house I turned it into my palatial 500 dollar house you tell me a little bit more about why you went underground well because I was freezing above ground and the reason I write about it and prophesize on it is because there are great advantages of going underground it's warm in the winter it's cool in the summer you use half the building materials you by yourself with hand tools there's less taxes the guy comes around to assess your house you say what for this hole in the ground you know it's aesthetically pleasing can be built by anyone you can camouflage it so it can't be found it's defensible it takes up none of the Earth's growing surface there's just any number of advantages to going underground why haven't we done it then why haven't we done it more on a mass scale that is a wonderful question and that's that's where I come in they haven't done it because they haven't figured out how to get windows into the places in in abundance and we figured that out I've always seen basement windows all my life I was originally going to put a basement window on the uphill side and then I thought well if I'm going to put a basement window in there why not bring it down also you know start stacking windows down on it and then I thought if I'm going to stack windows like that on the uphill side why not go out a little also and plant a garden out there so that's that's how the uphill patio came about I mean for example all of these windows here on the uphill side our windows that the normal builders and architects have never conceived of they built the first thought house they in a hillside like this they build a house like this with all the windows on the south side and they have very few if any windows at all on the rest of the house around the rest of the house so it has no balance of light and you knew you need a balance of light in a house you need windows from these two sides in every room that matters that one that you're shooting now is totally underground and unfortunately it's soon to go into the ground because it's a for 35 years now I've never done anything with it and any house that you leave go for 35 years goes pretty fast I was building this for other people when I started writing heavy again so I let it go but there was an ambitious little house in a pinch it would have slipped 17 people in here and I can't guarantee a second to collapse on us the first plans had this idea of going underground on a hillside and having a big bunch of South windows on it that is what I call the first slot house and it's a disaster that's what everybody builds when they build underground houses these days and they shouldn't be one of the advances that I made is when I build an underground house on a hill like this I cut out the upper part make what I call an uphill patio and that gives us lots of light from the upper side in the course if you plant that it's beautiful it's wonderful but what I want to show you as a shelter house that we we don't have completed but if times get really rough I'm sure I'll have plenty of volunteers up here to complete it yeah it's the shelter s nuclear attack forest fire earth changes riots whatever what have you since its underground if we if we don't have a stove in here but we've got a lot of people in here the body temperature will will keep this livable yeah it is it this roof ilysm at the level of the ground good idea that this is something can be replicable anywhere in the country sure and if you build it yourself it can be very inexpensive these guys he can pull off the land your posts and beams and girders and so the lumber might be maybe $300 we dug all this by hand by the way this and the other house in there so we can you juggle by hand shovels yeah I don't know how long it took us to dig wait I don't like digging much more than three hours a day but I do like digging up to three hours a day marvelous exercise you can see your progress you know as you're going good with mattock work it digging is fun within reason well we can start moving down we got a lot more to see Hey for two years before I moved up here I was a labor labor foreman wherever the machines couldn't dig we I saw that houses could actually be built you know how do you rotate with your bills how do you find a good spot by instinct by sleeping out on the site for a while when I was building for other people I would go up and I would sleep out on the site for a couple of nights get the feel of the place so you don't look for a certain type of dirt or a solidity to the dirt or something for building I would and in fact we're in about the prime building underground building area I've ever found it's silt and sand and a bit of clay the walls stand up when you when you dig either by hand or with a machine they stand up and hold their shape and there's no rock here which is really nice when you're hand digging you just love to be a bare foot now all my life really yep so for you back to the land is quite literal yeah yeah yeah would you consider yourself part of the back to land movement oh absolutely I was in the first wave of the hippie back-to-the-landers in 68 probably 10,000 hippies left the San Francisco area in the month of May I was one of that 10,000 we were biting off more than we could chew but what we could chew was wonderful this looks like a traditional house this is from this side ah you want from the other sides what an underground house is not an underground house is nowhere in common with the basement then a penthouse apartment has in common with a hot dark dusty attic you walk into this house from ground level and you take a few steps in and you're suddenly 12 feet underground beneath the surface rather we're 12 feet beneath the surface here we're 6 feet beneath the surface over there we would be somewhere between 12 and 6 feet beneath the surface on the south side and on the north side but we've excavated for four windows and for air and light and so forth you know at this point the earth was a little more than six feet deep here six feet deep at the end of that so is probably 8 or 10 feet deep here yes it doesn't feel underground no it's not technically underground it's a this is an earth integrated house we're working with the earth you know take it out if you want windows and doors this is one of our least completed rooms this is a bunk room and the upper bunks got good window the lower bunk we're going to get a two-foot-wide culvert and we're going to dig out a trench in the solid earth here and then back fell over it so the kid lying in bed there can still see Canada even though he's a solid earth between him and Canada this would be the bathroom we got some of the plumbing in but we don't have any water supply up here yet so we're not in any hurry to finish the bathroom this is called the cooks room it's the best bedroom in the house they get the best bed best mattress so you're insulating oh yeah we're above ground at this at this point but we're not insulating on these walls because it's Ella ders behind there this could be done in any limit sure matter each the temperatures of the climate up to any extreme degrees so if you live in a really hot climate or a really cool climate its work even better in really Hut and really cold climates and eight foot down the earth stays at the yearly mean temperature where that climate here it stays about 52 degrees an earth integrated house we're working with the earth we're not overwhelmed by the earth we don't overwhelm the earth we're working with her with the mother the heat from your house in the wintertime it's not escaping out into the atmosphere it's heating the outside of your house they and it still keeps eating in the outside of your house it retains that heat and the same thing on the cooling it's cooling your house in the summertime we're on a ridge at this point the ridge is fairly levels we cut through the ridge so we got lots of light from the south and lots of views from the north and good light from the north too normally I wouldn't I wouldn't use this this is a little atrium type thing here but I needed windows in there and needed windows here and I needed windows there so I built a little atrium one of the designs underground designs that I've developed here is you see how this part of the roof slants back before it comes down like this normally the roof is slanting like this but up here it's got an additional slant like this so that raises it above the normal pitch of the roof and that allows us to put windows in there and then all along that side and I call that a Sun scoop and as far as I know it's the first one ever built we want a house that's got windows on all four sides even though it's earth integrated and my all my other houses even if they're totally underground they still have windows on all four sides not everywhere in all four sides but they have windows on all four sides so we have light coming into a room from two directions in every room and that's really really really important it's funny because inside it doesn't feel like it's underground but outside it actually looks underground 50 percent underground yeah it looks like it just has to so is it just because you've chosen the opening so carefully well yeah sure sure there's there's one room here that's totally underground that's on the other on the other side of those other side of those windows we call that the cool room it's kind of like a mini root cellar we got three-foot earth on that roof that would do us in case of atomic attack that's the cool room yep yeah it's like it's like a root cellar in inside the house we've actually got a deep freeze that can go in there it runs off at 12 volts so really feels by conventional this feels a conventional living room to an extent it doesn't feel you know underground is it feel no but at the buoy are underground you know this is all earth on the roof fact we are super Earth integrated the walls are filled with earth in this house and that does a number of things it cuts the radiation if we're come to that to make the place fire resistant it helps insulate between the rooms it's dirt cheap so you're also probably saving on some insulation and oh sure oh sure my type of construction it does give support you have a beam here and a beam here and if you got earth behind it and you put a girder or something across there then the pressure from this side is counterbalanced by the pressure from that side you know so it becomes a very stable structure so you feel that anybody could do this it just is it like post-and-beam or is it a different idea no it's called PSP post sure and polyethylene system a post second to the ground we've treated or protecting it the wood from the earth nowadays I'm protecting them by charring them first of all which will double the lifespan of a post on the ground that's a post shoring as lumber out here you're going to have to have at least 2 inch lumber and most hillsides and your post should probably be not more than 6 feet apart and then you put a layer of polyethylene wrap the the lumber with a layer of polyethylene and you've got an extremely low-cost house extremely fire resistant radiation resistant wind resistant and it's going to heat you in the winter time and it's going to cool you in the summertime ok this is my own apartment here that's the kitchen area that's the dining table there and this is my work table where I'll be doing when we're writing ok though we're on the on the second floor at this level here we're approximately lower close to 3 foot below surface at this level here in this part of the house over here we're totally below the surface although it's a that's only it's only another 3 feet or so itself there something like this might be working visiting 2 people because it does look more conventional that they should integrate with the earth yeah I'm hoping so this is only 1,800 square feet we're bringing it in for probably one-tenth the cost of construction down in California or someplace like that you know all these structural members were off the land so it didn't cost me anything other than building it of the structural members in the cross supports here maybe they were off land the these two windows were salvaged and so they were only a couple of bucks each the challenges to come up with a integrated plan where you can put used used windows into a into a room and have a pattern that's pleasing to the eye I buy a lot of used windows and I number each window and I measure each window and I'll cut out little scale window models and I'll sit down and I'll you know you know I'll play with these things for a couple of nights and I come up with you know I like I like that I like those guys over there in particular my favorite this was this was kind of a tough one to come up with but I like it too the only window that I had to pay any real money for was that little gap there that angle guy I probably got these two big windows here for probably the two of them for 10 bucks I thought I was going to be able to pull this in for $15,000 as it turns out it's going to be probably 40,000 because can't do the labor myself anymore you based your ideas at all in untraditional designs I know there's a lot of traditional cultures that have gone underground Native Americans six example yeah Native Americans went underground from the Dakotas they had great big underground places with Don Wilson went whole to eliminate the smoke and let in light down to the southwest where they went three foot underground and then then arch natural vegetation over it you'll find various cultures who have gone underground I am totally absolutely irrevocably convinced that we are living in Industrial Age we are the ones who are living in poverty not the indigenous people of this world this was a $50 an up underground house book and it's been pretty much supporting me since 78 when I brought it out this is the house we were in earlier today that's that's the five hundred dollar house here's the first thought design you get Windows from only one side generally in a house like this which is terrible light you get all your drainage going back into the hillside and all your drainage coming down into the hillside and it's going to back up against this back wall I don't care what you do sooner or later that back wall is going to leak you have no cross ventilation in there you have no egress out the back it's a terrible thought house instead we turn it around like this we put in uphill patio there and all the moisture is coming down the hill absorbs into the ground before it reaches the house and if it is on a north slope you get a tremendous amount of light in there if it's on a south slope then you're going to put in Gables going to put in Royer fires you're going to put in Hollywood wings you're going to put in Sun scoops so there's no reason whatsoever to build an underground house that doesn't have all the windows you could possibly want in there this is the house we built for a client everything it was that was exposed to the atmosphere was windows or doors this was a 5,000 square-foot underground house with a greenhouse built in the early 1980s for $20,000 here was an underground house built in Holland the authorities came out and said hunts we understand you have been building illegally here and Hunt said take a look around man you know it's um I'm busy you'll have to look around yourself and they walked around this house and didn't see it the advantages of building an underground house especially with our method there's less tax to pay on it it's warm in the winter it's cool in the summer it's a fallout shelter it cuts atmospheric radiation it's defensible its concealable it's relatively fireproof no foundation is needed less other building material your pipes should never freeze they're weatherproof I can't believe people build houses in tornado and hurricane country if they went underground they're prettier down weather proof less maintenance on the places can be built by just about anyone they're pretty soundproof and because you're not taking up any or growing service you have increased yard space most aesthetically pleasing because you're working with nature so well and the reason people haven't gone underground because they haven't figured out yet how to get windows in the place and that's what we've done here in Idaho we figured that out for them you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 3,266,879

Rating: 4.8438053 out of 5

Keywords: underground house, subterranean house, underground home, subterranean home, earth shelter, earth sheltered home, bioclimatic house, underground architecture, hobbit house, tiny home, small space, small home, tiny house, home size, simple living, salvaged materials, found materials, recycled materials, passive solar house, off grid, off grid home, earth homes, natural building, earth building, sunken home, thermal mass, owner built home, DIY home, idaho

Id: 8B6xR3T37gI

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2015

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