Customer Reviews

Living Homes: Integrated Design & Construction

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While the author is a knowledgeable on the subject, if you are looking for a book that covers the topic in greater detail then check out Tomm Stanley's book "Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building With Slipforms". The material is covered in greater detail and in a well thought out manner.

Touches on a variety of "green" living homes. Not too many specifics on each type of construction. Good for an overview of options available. Not for the builder who has a particular form of construction already in mind.Good for starting the research process of green living.

The house of your dreams needn't be unaffordable: integrated design and construction methods can help in the planning process and can result in much savings, and LIVING HOMES: INTEGRATED DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION is the perfect guide to that process. Chapters cover everything from calculating energy usage and efficiency to considering water supply and waste system options, bonding walls, and more. Black and white photos throughout reinforce instructions on how to cut construction costs along the way. LIVING HOMES deserves ongoing recommendation as an excellent choice for any who would pay attention to cost-efficient design.

Most of the housing being built today is shoddy. Volume homebuilding corporations breeze into town, rape the land, slap up substandard cardboard-quality "houses" on postage stamp-sized lots and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit. Many of these contractors get run out of the state, change their corporate name and then move on the next urban sprawl boom.

If you're sick and tired of seeing beehive neighborhoods spring up in your town with siding walls you can put your fist through, do yourself a favor and take this crash course on alternative homebuilding. This book will give you an excellent starting place to learn about how you can build your own high quality, inexpensive home with low environmental impact.

There is a lot of detail in this book on the methods presented. The "butt and pass" log home building chapter alone is worth 20 times the cost of the book. You won't easily find that information anywhere else outside of taking a log home building class from the Log Home Builders Association in Monroe, Washington, which is the only place I know of that teaches that method.

Most would-be home builders believe a dream house would cost a fortune to construct from scratch: that isn't true, maintains author Elpel, who built his dream house with his wife. The planning of such a home is the key - and is the key to Living Homes: Integrated Design & Construction. Chapters cover energy efficiency concerns, home construction basics, and water supply and management with an eye to revealing how design and construction can work together to fit into both a budget and a dream plan. From strawbale walls to interior finishing, Living Homes provides a gold mine of construction specifics for any neophyte builder.

I have pored through many, any books on design, and I have spent the past seven years or so researching and planning the home that I will one day build in Alaska. This home will be mostly made of earth, will stay warm 11 months of the year without any sort of exogenous heating source, will grow massive amounts of food indoors, will be very very inexpensive to build, and will just generally be pretty awesome.

This book is one of the best and most useful titles on home design that I have ever come across. It deals with a huge variety of topics, and is packed full of wisdom and intelligent building concepts. I ordered it specifically because it has a step-by-step on how to build a Russian stove, but there are many, many more topics contained within.

My favorite books on design include The One Straw Revolution, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, Passive Solar Homes, How to Grow More Vegetables, A Pattern Language, Natural Capitalism, Shelter, Earthships, Cradle to Cradle, and now this. It has been a gem of a discovery. If you are interested in design and in building your own incredible home, this book would be a fantastic investment.

Fantastic resource for the owner builder. This guy answered so many of my questions. Sections on slipform is very thorough. Thank you Tom Elpel.

Living Homes has provided me with entertainment and information I was seeking. I am planning on building a new house and this book gave me a lot of information to think about. I like the energy efficiency that the book promotes and it gives a lot of ideas to think about when planning an energy efficient home. Stone masonry fireplaces for heat was a subject that I wanted to explore and the book has some information on it. It also describes many different types of heating systems involving heating water in a floor and solar heaters.

Lots of good information. Nice as a reference point for projects and also good to just pick up and read sections here and there for inspiration, motivation, and encouragement. Perhaps not as many diagrams and drawings as I hoped for, but there are still plenty. Really should be included as the starting point in your library of sustainable living and alternative building. Lots more books referenced in this book (and authored by Elpel), all of which should be added to your collection. The author is well-spoken and the book is well-written. Elpel has a very mature attitude and a focus that encompasses much more than his own immediate and personal.

This is one of the few books that I've come across about alternative building methods that is truly catered towards how to build it yourself on a budget. He doesn't cover every possible green building technology, but he covers the ones he knows and has worked with in great detail, including step by step instructions, pictures, a recount of which methods and materials have worked well and which haven't, and ideas about what he would consider doing differently in the future. I've read it cover to cover and will certainly use it as a reference during the planning and building phases of our future home.