Building a House (Out of Sand)
Monday, May 19th, 2008To wit, sandbags.
Building materials, as you may (or may not) have noticed, are expensive. Really expensive. So how do you throw up a small structure on that spare plot of land you’re eyeballing because it’s really cheap and somewhere convenient?
Exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. You can get a decent plot of land anywhere on the cheap, but what to put on it to make it a bit more useful as a stopover destination.. there’s the rub.
Even without running water or electricity a campsite style layover’s not bad. But I always liked a cabin over a tent.
It appears there are a few options. Sandbags can be used to make a reliable structure (makes sense, they work for instant dams). Although to be honest those places look all together a bit too crunchy for my taste.
An outfit out of Africa intends to make a system for putting up a sandbag based structure that looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, their website doesn’t leave me with any indication on their status as a real company.
To get a better idea, this page on Sandbag shelter prototypes (mostly for disaster relief) contains video and picture documentaries of various implementations around the world. These folks also have some nicer looking structures than some of the other sites I ran into.