As I continue my research on alternative housing ideas, I find that they are so many more options that I could ever imagine. One of my favorite ideas for new housing is using recycled materials, like Phoenix Commotion. To summarize my three-part series on alternative housing ideas, below is a list of topics I’ve been focusing on:

• Topic 1: Converting old buildings, such as train depots, post offices, and even grain silos into a house.; I like the idea of repurposing an old building and making it livable. The silo idea is fascinating, too bad there aren’t many in my area.
• Topic 2: Container houses; I’ve come across this topic a few times while looking at prefab houses. I think there are some great plans out there.
• Topic 3: Building homes out of recycled materials; I’ve posted about this before, Phoenix Commotion is just one company that builds homes out of recycled materials for a very low cost. I really like the idea of incorporating recycled materials in a home.

Topic 3 – Recycled Residences; building homes using lightly used materials

I first came across this idea through Treehugger.com, they featured a small company called Phoenix Commotion. Phoenix Commotion was building houses for low-income families out of the most unusual materials, all of which were salvaged. What really caught my eye while scanning the article’s photographs was one particular wall made from the bottoms of glass wine bottles. I thought it was a most creative way to reuse old glass bottles and this got me thinking: Instead of throwing away our glass bottles, mason jars, windows, or old lumber, why not donate them for projects such as these? Apparently I’m not the only one to think this represents the meaning of reuse, recycle, reduce.

Here are just a few other amazing ideas that fall into the recycled residences theme:

• Use recycled materials to build your dream home: Eliminate the Muda posted not long ago about retiring in Detroit. Not because the city is a haven for retirees, but because the housing market is so affordable (you can still find homes for under $20,000!). But what if instead of moving there, you purchased a home then moved it to a new location? Or, purchased a deteriorating home, then used the lumber and windows for a recycled residence some place else? It could work with some creativity and hard work. *On a side note,  I’m not saying everyone should move historic homes out of the city or that the city is uninhabitable. I don’t want to cause more harm to a city that is already struggling.
• Build a Cob Home: I posted about cob homes before, when one young man spent over a year making and building his home out of straw, sand, and clay. However, there is an entire site dedicated to these types of homes. Cob homes look a little like the hobbit homes in Lord of the Rings, they are made of natural materials and are hand shaped, many in circular patterns versus today’s standard rectangular shaped house. They are durable, completely environmentally friendly, and requires no heavy machinery.
• Build a Paper House: This may seem like a ridiculous idea, just think what would have happened to the three little pigs had the third pig built a paper house! However, technology has changed the idea of paper into a more durable structure, especially when it’s shaped in the style of a honeycomb and is as thick as cardboard. Inhabitat featured a durable wall house last year that is literally made out of recycled paper. For under $5,000 an inexpensive dwelling can be built to withstand generations of use.

Summary

So many choices for homes exist today. Luckily, I have some time before I purchase or build my own little house. With an endless supply of creativity for reusing and recycling materials, perhaps my home will include some of these features. I live for the day when I can describe and showcase it! Until then, I can drool over these seemingly abundant ideas.

Would you be open to building a home out of recycled materials? What about cob?

The Elsmore Kit Home from Sears - click on this image to see the full page.

My obsession with home architecture and floor plans is a never-ending journey of research, fascination, and amazement. This is partly due to my love of history, especially anything nostalgic (a very subjective idea). Sears Roebuck fits that definition of nostalgia. There was a time when they ruled the mail order catalog business, sold good-quality items that no one else carried, and fulfilled a need for basic necessities. My how far they’ve fallen!

In researching small, green, cottage house plans, their name popped up in my Google search. I wasn’t surprised, for not only did they sell skates, clothing, gardening equipment, tractors, harnesses for work horses, and sod, they also sold kit home plans.

Sears Roebuck dates back to 1886 when Richard Sears began selling watches to supplement his income. A year later, he joined up with another watch-maker, Alvah Roebuck. A couple years after that, they launched their first catalog. But it wasn’t until 1908 that they began selling home kits. Why would they not? They sold just about everything that belonged in and around a house, might as well sell the whole house too!

Sears homes were truly kit homes, they would use existing home architecture (they weren’t reinventing the wheel), included precut lumber, fitted framing, and then ship all the construction elements by railroad to the new owner. Everything was included in the shipment, even the nails. Their designs were fabricated so that only one carpenter was needed to put the home together. It was called “Balloon Style” framing. Customers could order designs “as-is”, redesign a floor plan or combine a couple of the plans Sears offered, or draw up blueprints specifically to their needs and Sears would precut the lumber and supply all the materials needed. Homeowners were in complete control of their home design.   Sears wasn’t the first company to sell prefab homes, but they sold more than any other, about 100,000 over their 32 year span.

A real Sears Roebuck home in Libertyville, IL

The last of the Sears Roebuck homes were sold in 1940. Unfortunately, their Modern Home program failed due to the Great Depression negatively affecting their home financing department (Does this sound familiar? Everything old is new again?!…housing bubble…). Yet, many of the Sears kit homes still stand today, particularly in Libertyville, IL. There are also many books dedicated to the floor plans Sears sold during its hey-day, including Homes in a Box: Modern Homes from Sears. Reconstructing the floor plans probably wouldn’t be that difficult for today’s prefab home builders.

I might have to look into purchasing or researching Sears kits home plans for sale.

Do you live in an area that is known for Sears Roebuck homes? Do you know anyone who lives in one of these homes? You may now be curious as to if your home is a Sears Roebuck Modern Home. If you are, use this link for further research, it’s a start.

This is a guest post from Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff: A Personal Financial Blog about the Next Financial Step. It’s an open fiscal diary and a personal finance blog rolled into one.

My husband does not want to stay in our current home forever. He wants more room…specifically more rooms. After board gaming at a few different homes, he is lusting after more space. Luckily, he has a cheap streak too, so we will wait until our house is paid off before even approaching the idea of moving. But our conversation did lead me to think, how much house is enough house for us?

I’m happy with our 3 bedroom home. I love our Master bedroom with our attached bathroom. I’m cool with the fact we use one of the spare bedrooms as my husband’s office. I’m also fine with turning the other bedroom into a guest bedroom/hobby room if he’d like.

I don’t think we need a separate library, office, hobby room, guest bedroom, and gaming area.

Our friends have some pretty awesome houses. I know exactly where he got these ideas. But I also know that those same friends make way more than we do. I don’t want to suffer from lifestyle inflation.

I also hate the idea of moving at all. Buying our home was not a fun process at all. It was stressful. Even the moving part was awful since the first movers never showed up and we had to wait all day to get fit in on a different company’s schedule. I also don’t enjoy the whole unpacking process. I just hate moving.

That hatred could easily convince me to stay exactly where we are until I’m too old to go up the stairs.

I know that my husband would never put his wants ahead of our finances, but I’m already trying to come up with ways to make our house seem bigger to him. I just think that as long and the TV works and we have a table to play games on, we’re doing just fine…

What do you think? How much house is enough house for you?

Recycled House by DRW

I love writing about little house plans, or residential architecture in general. Yet it takes some research, on my part, to find new home designs, links to great sites, and then time for me to organize my thoughts into legible paragraphs. I keep thinking that I’ll set aside one day a week for house plan posts, but with my limited amount of time, this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

But with that being said, I did find time this week to research some ecofriendly house designs that I thought were interesting.

• Circular home designs - Deltec Homes: I’ve never been a big fan of octagonal or circular homes. I just didn’t understand the purpose to them. However, I found the Deltec site that explains it. In so many words, the point of them being there are no “load-bearing” interior walls allowing for just about any floor plan layout. Their roof acts as the supporting beams, so the modifications to the interior are endless. I can see this being a huge factor if one wants a very open floor plan. The only drawback I see to circular homes is that many of the walls are curved. This would drive me crazy placing furniture against them.
• Passive Solar Designs – The Plan Collection: Passive solar is a up and coming word these days. Basically, if you design the house with enough light and windows pointing in just the right direction, you can heat your house naturally. This would save money on your gas bill during the fall and winter months. Though, I would worry about the summer months in warmer regions, like say, Arizona! You don’t want your house acting as a sauna.
• More Passive Solar Designs - SunTerra: I like the fact that SunTerra explains the point of a passive solar home and includes the importance of overhangs for shade. They also calculate how much money could be saved on heating a house passively, approximately 1/3 overall. Their home plans include explanations of how each home’s architecture reinforces green building ideas such as a zero energy home and an earth sheltered home. I also learned the purpose of a flatter pitched roof:  it decreases the interior volume improving the energy efficiency.

As a more critical consumer, many house plan sites I come across boast about “green building.” But to put things in perspective, green building really boils down to being resource efficient. The more recycled materials, the less stress is put upon the environment. My all time favorite home builders is Phoenix Commotion: taking one persons junk and turning it into another person’s treasure.

I have to say that this past decade has been full of ups and downs. However, I’m glad that with those downs it limited the amount of credit that lenders extended to me. For instance, at the end of 1999 and early 2000, I made a bunch of really bad financial choices. These bad choices negatively affected my credit. My bad credit limited the amount of credit that was offered to me. So with this past decade’s housing boom (and bust) and easy credit terms, these things just weren’t available to me to mess up even more. And, it gave me time to really learn why it’s important to have good credit, how to get good credit, and how to keep my credit in good standing.

My bad choices in the long run were really silver linings in a sense. I know many people, younger than me, who were extended a lot of credit through credit cards over these past 10 years. They maxed out their credit cards at a whopping $29,000 and are now in a lot of trouble. The most credit I was ever extended, right before I completely dug myself into a hole, was $5,000. Before 2000, most credit card lenders were more cautious with their credit limits. These limits were thrown to the wind sometime in early 2001/2002 at the start of the housing boom. Everyone thought they could use their homes as ATM’s and pay off their massive credit card debt. Why not? Their home value would increase exponentially forever, right?

Wrong. I remember in 2003, a friend of ours had just gotten a dream job as a mortgage broker. Handing out ARM’s to people with sketchy credit made her a fortune (sadly she lost most of it right before the bust.) At the time, she said that because there were people like her to hand out loans to just about anyone, home values would never go down. Her managers saw no end to the housing boom. My husband and I were just flabbergasted that homes could possible continue on their upward movement. In 2005, a small fixer-upper was going for $525,000, we just couldn’t see why anyone would pay that much or more for such a place. We just didn’t believe what we were hearing.

Thankfully we didn’t buy into that trap. There was a moment where our mortgage broker friend tried to convince us to buy property on a 5/1 ARM loan. She really believed that home values would remain constant or go up. It’s not like we were predictors of the future, we just couldn’t figure out how to pay for a half-million dollar property. The skyrocketing values just didn’t make sense, and I’m one for common sense (most of the time.)

This decade of minimal credit made me pay for things in cash. The small credit card bills that we had 15 months ago have all been paid off. Our last remaining debt (besides a student and car loan) is a line of credit. With hard work, crunching the numbers, and determination I should be able to tackle it within 18 months.

What things did you learn this past decade? Are there anythings that you would change? What would you do differently?