Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Hobbit House is a Mouse's Dream

Do they not have termites in Wales? This article about a man building his own house for around £3000 disturbs me. I see a lot of stuff about small homes where people say how easy it is, you can do it too. If that's what they think after building their own house then they didn't do it right. Maybe I only think it's hard because I built mine when I was 37 year old, 120 pound woman and they're all strapping young men.

Maybe I only think building a house is hard because I took all those engineering classes and I know the risks and dangers of doing a bad job and they are artists who didn't take statics. I took it twice. I had to drop it the first time because I was failing. Statics is really hard. For those of you who don't know what statics is, here's the summary from the Georgia Tech course catalog: Forces and moments; equilibrium in two and three dimensions; multi-force members; equilibrium, centroids and friction. Hmm, that's still not layman's language is it? Well, take it from me, it's important shit. It's the study of what it takes to hold up the built environment. It will give you a healthy appreciation for what you don't know. I think this is what scares me about people that make it sound trivial to build a house. They don't know what they don't know, and that's dangerous. Statics is about things that aren't moving. You can add a live load, like wind or traffic or people dancing and that's still statics. Dynamics is when you add degrees of freedom and introduce momentum and inertia. I changed my major so I could take Classical Mechanics in the Physics department instead of Dynamics in the Mechanical Engineering Department because my brother told me flat out I would never pass that class. The Physics professors were just better teachers than the Mechanical Engineering professors. They were just really old and had figured it out, not a slight to the ME department. It was enough of an advantage for me to manage in Physics. My brother took Dynamics though, and he assures me that if a tornado lifts my house out of the ground it will just roll along intact like a tumbleweed and I can get a crane and just put it back in place. Once he knows the wind speed it took to pull it up he can calculate the countermeasures I need in the foundation to keep it from doing it again. I designed it to hold the house up and straight and forgot the possibility there would be forces LIFTING the house. And this is me, trained in engineering. What did the artist forget when he built his house?

This artist with the hobbit house claims he built it with nothing but a chainsaw, a chisel, and a hammer. I am not impressed, I'm worried. I spent more on tools to build my house than he spent on his whole house. I already had them, though, bought to work on other projects, so it was a good use of my resources to build a house. The most important tool I had was my dad's college copy of Ramsey and Sleeper's Architectural Graphic Standards. It has tables where they've worked out all the statics ahead of time and tell you how big your beams have to be to span the space you want. It tells you how many nails you have to nail in a pair of 2x8s to achieve the required strength as a beam and a myriad of other important information. Besides reference material, here's the top 50 tools I used to build my house: (In order of importance.)

  1. Multiple pairs of safety glasses, shooters earmuffs, and mechanics gloves
  2. 12" Compound power miter saw with electric brake
  3. 16' and 25' measuring tapes
  4. Battery powered impact driver
  5. Sand filled dead blow mallet
  6. High quality utility knife
  7. Mechanical pencils
  8. 4' level
  9. Speed Square
  10. 4 Quickgrip clamps
  11. Extension cords
  12. Vice grip pliers
  13. Corded drill
  14. Plastic folding saw horses
  15. Air compressor
  16. Air powered framing nailer
  17. Snapper shear Hardiboard cutting tool
  18. 16' extension ladder
  19. Carpenter's Square
  20. Air powered palm nailer
  21. Jigsaw with wood and metal blades
  22. 10" circular saw with wood blade and Hardiboard blade
  23. Reciprocating saw
  24. Chisels
  25. Purdy paint brushes
  26. Air powered trim nailer
  27. Air powered stapler
  28. Caulk gun
  29. Palm sander
  30. Belt sander
  31. Post hole diggers
  32. 8' step ladder
  33. Water level
  34. Chalk line
  35. Plumb bob
  36. Bevel gauge
  37. 20' extension ladder
  38. PEX tubing crimp tool
  39. Large assortment of drill bits
  40. Ratchet and sockets for lag bolts
  41. Bench mounted belt and disc sander
  42. Drill press
  43. Power planer
  44. 10' step ladder
  45. Shovel and hoe
  46. Tile cutter
  47. Thinset trowels and grout floats
  48. Lineman's pliers
  49. Needle nosed pliers
  50. Hammer

I read farther into the website about this house. They don't even own it. They were just asked to build it and allowed to live there for free while they did. Well that makes all the difference! If you don't have to maintain it for the rest of your life who gives a shit?! I built my house with a lot of attention to making sure it wouldn't be a burden on my nieces 50 years from now. I made it low maintenance and capable of being shut down for long periods of time. If you're just building a house for an art project, pssshhh. Don't even put that on the internet. That's not fair. You're spreading false information! All the people saying they would just love to live in something so warm and adorable just didn't notice there's no hot water in there. People assume "house" includes some basic criteria. Nobody shows photos of the water heater in Architectural Digest, you just assume there is one. Not so here. Saying it's really inexpensive and only took 4 months to build, yet it doesn't have the basic amenities like water under pressure and bathing facilities isn't really fair.


  1. I love it when a passionately "eco-friendly" couple is shown with their TWO CHILDREN...

  2. Well, to maintain population in a first world country you need 2.1 children per couple to account for infant and childhood mortality, so as long as they don't breed that 1/10th of a kid at least they're not into the red on overbreeding. :P