This Geodesic Dome Home was Built by Hand for Only $18,000 back in the 80s

hi i'm john and this is linda linda my wife uh 51 years now 1973 we started building this house and we think it's the best place on the planet this video is sponsored by element they are offering all of you a free sample pack just pay for shipping stick around to the end of the video to hear about this great offer [Music] i was a banker in london i was training at a far eastern merchant bank to be sent to singapore or hong kong or somewhere i had zero interest i was going to go to art school i was hoping to become a film cameraman then i got a job at the bbc and linda was my temporary secretary but after you know working for a while in the city of london and commuting every day on the train and the rain and everything so we decided we'd have nothing let's go to canada because my one of my friends had an uncle in vancouver so we got into the park and paper business from being merchant bankers to really rough work in the in the park mill yeah i was 19 when i made that decision you'd been to expo 67 expo 67 in montreal they had a big dome there which was one of the first in the early 70s the idea of domes was you know kind of exciting and so we just drove down here on spec in an old truck it was the last piece of property for sale on this side of the road this year virgin land rocks trees cut the trees down myself we took the trees to a local sawmill had them cut into lumber and we brought it back scrabbled on the ground and made the foundations ourselves just made it up as we went along bought some two by fours here and there and some plywood and but mostly it's from my own trees we actually camped on a rock just across the driveway we camped in the house for a while one plug-in and one light bulb and we moved in and after six months it was really uh canadian homesteading i kept detailed notes of every piece of wood every piece of wire i bought what was built on what day and what date and i think we reckoned eighteen thousand dollars or something to build a whole house of course that's seventies eighties dollars but uh it doesn't cost much to do it yourself [Music] the house itself is a 32 foot diameter dome and it's sitting on a post and bean platform the 10 sides was to make it as round as possible so the dome would fit on top made it up early as we went along decided that we need eight foot in the basement and then we put a deck around it eventually after a few years the dome is made up of interlocking triangles so that's what gives it its strength the actual struts had to be bought from a very small company like a couple of hippies in vancouver they had an engineer's stamp on the drawing so we had to have that that part of it went up in two days and then the places where we decided we wanted windows and we left open and the rest we just filled in it's an arc of the winter sun so when we were building we watched where the sun went and we put check marks on the struts to say okay this is where we're going to have a window we had no plans earlier on so we marked which ones were going to be glass and then we boarded in all the other ones went over in our old truck to vancouver and we bought a great big crate of sheet glass i think they were four for six by eight foot sheets and when you're making the first cut for the first triangle you've got a great big piece of glass in your hand when you snap it off cutting those great big pieces of glass and then getting them up there and sealing them was maybe one of the hardest things their shakes all the way down to the ground they're so small you can you can go around a spherical surface particularly as you get to the top you actually have to cut them into a more of a taper and we had scaffolding in there to do all this and it took a long process but we never could find anything else that would do the job of the shakes do shakes are good so we put this pool in about 1982. i was driller's assistant for a couple of days i drilled the holes over there and a few shots of dynamite or whatever they use and we had a great big hole in the ground they would dug it out and put it up there and then eventually built the greenhouse on top of all the rock that came out of the pool i'm not much of a vegetable gardener i'm not much of a gardener at all really but uh i have a little bit going here a few lettuces a few tomatoes the greenhouse was built out of the glass i had left over from building the house i kept it for 30 or 40 years before before building the greenhouse i've got glass for that so i had to make the windows a certain size to accept the glass that i'd [Music] kept this is our front door it was a bit too public at one time so i learned how to do some stimulus the only thing i didn't build pretty well are these kitchen cabinets and we eventually broke down and got somewhere to build these and they've been here for 40 years very good they were everything in britain is wallpapered when we first came here we wallpapered everything in sight there was wallpaper everywhere the construction is mainly center posts holding beams up beams are bolted to the struts and the inside sits on the center post and that's that's the construction so before we built the upstairs this was just one big platform plywood platform we put the dome up on it covered everything in see the shiplap the insulation behind that see there is some styrofoam which was more common back in the 70s and some fiberglass insulation they're only two by four struts so the insulation behind that cedar is only three and a half inches if i had to do it again i would make everything out of two by sixes rather than two by fours but uh it's been okay we just pay a slightly higher heating bill and we have a good fireplace that eats this the rest of it is baseboard heaters we knew we were going to have a mezzanine of some kind but we didn't know how big it was going to be we i think we actually had it bigger than that to start with and then we took one of the beams away and reduced it when we first moved in with the two babies they had bunk beds up in there that was the kids bedroom and we slept on a mattress on the floor up here it was pretty rough so we lived in this park for a long time before deciding we needed more space for the kids so this came later that created the deck between and this is a nice place for coffee and give our guests breakfast here but we let them have their privacy if they wanted or we chat if they want to check and uh so this is the edition we built when the kids became teenagers to get a bit more room in the early days we didn't have the light because because we wanted to play ping pong in here and we put the skylights in and we uh the floor is rescued from mount sikka coppermine which was demolished many many years ago and sat there rotting till a friend of mine salvaged the wood and he didn't use it in the end so i bought the flooring here for a hundred dollars from him and it's all it's green fur not a knot in it the best wood you can get these are linda's paintings memoirs of our tango life and there's that picture there is in argentina typical orchestra i played tango back in the 30s pacific energy stove i recently cleaned that chimney with not a nothing in it after a year and it's been used a lot so it's so efficient and so clean it heats this whole building easily with a couple of sticks so then there's a big downstairs [Music] the guest bedroom because of the strange shape again in this building is hexagonal building and we've got some weird corners and we had to fudge it a little bit [Music] bathroom in here from the shower and then we we created a bridge underneath that deck to connect the houses at this level so now we're back in the dome [Music] this is the big post that holds the whole house up one of the trees i cut down and this used to be our son's bedroom just a little spare bedroom and then it became my granddaughter's bedroom this is our bedroom and we get we get the morning sun waking us up when the the sea planes taking off like a kind of an alarm clock every day at our upper seven yeah this was my darkroom at one time and then it was our dog's bedroom it's been all sorts of things there's a laundry room in here for a while it's all changed over the years every room has weird angles everyone is decorated differently different heights there's quite a low ceiling here a little fireplace down here as well kind of nice it triggered something in my brain um like that i can fix anything so i'm more constantly fixing things and building things and designing things and you know without that experience i don't know i was working 12-hour shifts during most of those years i'd come home and put up another sheet of drip rocker it's all been hard work but it's good no it keeps you young i think i suppose the major lesson is don't put things yeah don't put it just do it i mean uh if i never built anything more than the rabbit hutch you know you they can build a house and anybody can do it don't put things off in life yeah time really goes by so fast go ahead the last 50 years here or 48 years here has really flown by when sometimes when you think about it electrolytes probably play a more critical role than you may think having or not having enough electrolytes in your body affects everything from how your brain works and mental health to your appetite and curbing cravings everybody needs electrolyte but especially those that are on a low carb diet they're doing intermittent or extended fasting or you are very active exercise a lot and you sweat a lot it's very important that you get enough electrolytes electrolytes can really make the difference between feeling great and feeling like garbage electrolyte deficiency symptoms can be headaches fatigue cramps weakness and hunger so i've been drinking element now for a few months and i can really tell the difference between when i'm properly hydrated with electrolytes versus when i'm not so i highly recommend it my favorite flavors 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Channel: FLORB

Views: 375,692

Keywords: tiny house, simple living, tiny house tour, tiny house on wheels, florb, dylan magaster, dome home, dome, geodesic dome, geodome, diy, self build, homestead, canada, budget, real estate, diy tiny house, off grid, homesteading, diy home, geodesic dome tour, geodesic dome home, geodesic dome tent, geodesic dome house, dome house, dome build, luxury glamping dome, luxury dome, glamping dome, building a geodesic dome, tour, full tour, house tour, airbnb tour, tiny home tour

Id: AZpcsrGgpm0

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021