I’ve mentioned this before, but there is a special place in my heart for tiny houses on wheels.  I recently stumbled across this vintage postcard of a portable beach cabin and couldn’t resist sharing.

Apparently these could be rented in the resort town of Ostende, Belgium. The large-spoke wheels allowed these little buildings to be pushed directly into the water and the the bathing beauties who were inside could come out and descend directly into the water via the step-ladder style steps, thus preserving some degree of their modesty.

As one of the modern-day women who, on occasion has had to do the “walk of shame” from beach towel to water after a winter of too much ice cream and too little gym time, I can definitely see the appeal of this little structures.

Besides, it’s just plain cute.

So, after reviewing my insightful and riveting journalistic series on earthships, you’ve decidde you simply have to have one of your own. What are your options?

1. Buy One

Buying an earthship that is up for sale is definitely the quickest and least labor-intensive available option for getting in to your own earthship. And there are realtors, like John Kejr, who specialize in earthship listings.

By purchasing an existing structure you can most likely avoid the headaches involved in terms of passing muster with the local zoning boards. In most cases, someone else has already done the work for you.

On the down side of buying an existing structure, earthships tend to involve a lot of individualistic expression. If your tastes differ from the prior owners, remodeling may require more effort than in more traditionally-built homes. Many mortgage companies are also leery of alternative homes. (Although, there are some who do offer financing on earthships).

Finally, buying an existing home is likely to be the most expensive option per square foot.

2. Build One Yourself

Michael Reynolds has done a fantastic job of documenting how to build an earthship from the ground up in his 3-volume series “Earthship”. Volume One focuses on basic building techniques. Volume Two covers systems and components. Volume Three covers evolutions in techniques since the first two volumes were written. There are also two supplemental books: Water from the Sky and Comfort in Any Climate which cover water management and solar design, respectively, in more detail. All of the books can be found on Amazon or ordered from the Earthship Biotecture Store.

If you’re nervous that you won’t have the necessary skills to build your home simply by reading the books, you also have the option of attending a weekend seminar or contributing labor on a demo project in order to gain some hands-on experience.

Building your own earthship will involve a great deal of manually-intensive work. Most people who build their own earthships take 3-4 years to complete their projects. On the plus side, however, building your own home allows you to build as the funds become available, allowing you to avoid having to take out a mortgage.

If you want to get a good idea what you’re in for, though, check out the following videos…

3. Hire Someone Else to Build One For You

A growing number of architects and builders are becoming familiar with earthships. Earthship Biotecture can refer you to one in your area or you can hire them to build one for you.

In fact, Earthship Biotecture has built enough homes that they actually offer packaged designs with several custom features which range in size from one to three bedrooms, and are the most economical way to employ their services. The packaged designs run roughly $150 per square foot to have them build.

If you want something more individualistic in design, they can do that, too. You can either for you.

Of course, with building, you’re either going to have to have the funds on hand or you’re going to have to find a lender willing to finance the project. In addition, if you’re building somewhere other than an existing earthship community, you’re going to have to jump through some hoops with the local zoning board in your area to get a building permit.

4. Have Someone Build the Shell and You Do the Rest

An option between #2 and #3 would be to have someone build the outer shell and set up the systems in the house (solar, water, greywater), and then finish the project yourself. Earthship Biotecture is willing to do this and odds are good you might be able to hire a local earthship-friendly builder to do the same.

This route allows you to enlist the experts for the most difficult aspects of construction and then either serve as your own general contractor to coordinate local workers or finish the home by yourself, reducing overall costs. With this approach, you could also finish individual spaces as you had the funds (and time). This also would give you maximum flexibility in terms of finishing details like cabinetry, wall treats, floor materials, etc.

This option is not as backbreaking as #2 and not as expensive as #3.

This list is not meant to be all-inclusive, but, hopefully I’ve given those of you who are interested in living in one of these fascinating homes a good starting point for investigating your options!

Remember a little while back when I was whinging about the atypical weather in Portland and the minor fact that my house had no roof on it at the time?

Well, I just stumbled across a video of my nearby neighbor, Scott Niesen, who writes the Floating Home FAQ, shoveling snow off his deck so his house didn’t sink.

I swear you just can’t make stuff this good up.

Since I had previously reported on a concrete pipe drain house design, I had wanted to share this unique design for a hotel room.

These rooms are available at the Park Hotel.  Each room is secured with a key code and features a double bed, light, power, sleeping bags, and blankets.  There is also a main complex which includes toilets and shower and a minibar.

Another innovative feature about the hotel is the rooms operate on a”pay as you wish” system.  Users leave what they can afford or wish to donate to the project.

Details of this story courtesy of an article on  ApartmentTherapy.

Earthship Biotecture currently rents out a couple of their earthships that are currently listed for sale by the night and the rates are quite reasonable.

I decided to stay in The Hut earthship, both because of it’s one-bedroom designed and because I had seen pictures of it in several books and was charmed by many of its interior features.

In particular, I loved the use of the round rooms, the quirky kitchen cabinets, the colorful canvas ceilings, round bedroom, the generous use of banana trees in the planters, and truly funky bathroom.

Aesthetically, the little earthship was everything I hoped for and more.  A large planter dominates the main living area, making it feel like you’ve carved a home in the middle of a rain forest. The dining room table attached to a large tree trunk which serves as a support pillar from the ceiling and hand-carved chairs also contributed to the feeling.

I wondered what I was going to think of the DC-based ceiling lights, but I really enjoyed their slightly dimmer light in the evening hours.  It almost felt like having starlight overhead.  And supplemental AC lights provided more than enough to work and read by after sunset.

The rammed earth and adobe walls provided an amazing amount of insulation to the outside, both in terms of temperature and noise.  Other than the sound of a winter storm brushing past the skylights in the ceiling, no external noises made their way into the home.  It really felt like I was camping out in a well-equipped little hobbit house, and it was a quite comfortable feeling.

I wondered if the lack of windows in the bedroom was going to feel claustrophobic to me.  But there was something really neat about sleeping in a round room  tucked back into the earth.  I felt like I had my own little burrow.  And with the bathroom with windows just beyond, I had natural light when I wanted it.

I could absolutely see myself living in an small earthship designed like The Hut full-time.  But let me give you the less than fully positives now…

Probably the biggest negative I experienced was the toilet. There was  faint but noticeable smell of sewage in the house the entire length of my visit.  If you’ve every visited a rest stop with compost-based toilets, it was about an equivalent level of smell.  Not intolerable, but definitely there.

The Hut has the current typical sewage system design, meaning that it runs on greywater that has been filtered from the planters and flushes into a solar-aided septic tank.  One of the things I was warned about when making arrangements for my stay is that earthships function there best when they’re inhabited on a regular basis.  The Hut, however, only gets visitors a couple times a month.  It’s very possible that not enough greywater had been generated recently (through things like bathing, washing dishes, etc.) to adequately supply and flush the toilet system.  I’m really not sure and wasn’t able to ask about it before I had to leave the next morning.

And just one more aside on the toilet…  I have to confess that it was initally a little disconcerting to try to use a toilet that was built on a platform several feet above the bathroom floor.  I’ve heard bathrooms referred to as “the throne room” before.  In this case, I think the description is distinctly appropriate.

The other downside to my stay is that the temperature inside the earthship was probably somewhere around 50 degrees overnight.  Not intolerable but definitely colder than I was used to.  Again, though, I had been cautioned that this particular earthship tended to get colder than most.  I think that was probably due to the limited southern exposure.  The Hut is tucked directly behind a berm which is obstructing some of the southern exposure.   The amount of large trees in the planter probably weren’t helping matters, either.  I suspect another contributor to cooler temperature was the kiva fireplace in the living room which seemed to be leaking warm air out through the chimney.  If I was to be living there, I’d want to try to determine what could be done to maintain the temperature a little better overnight.

One other incidental thing which surprised me was how humid it was inside the earthship compared to the outside air.  I’m sure this is due to the planters.  In New Mexico, a little increase in humidity is hardly a bad thing.  But I wouldn’t want to be dealing with it if I lived somewhere like Houston or Miami.

All in all though, I really enjoyed my time in an earthship.  And I’m excited by their potential to provide sustainable housing for people in the future.

(By the way, if you are as charmed by the photographs of The Hut as I was, it’s currently listed for sale with an asking price of $260,000.  If you buy it, however, I want visiting rights!)

On a silly note, I stumbled across the $timator website last night where you can supposedly calculate the “real website value”.  Naturally, I had to plug in Coming Unmoored.  I came in around $5,000 which is a far cry from Amazon.com’s $619 million.

$timator even goes so far as to provide a dispassionate report of your website’s charms and failings. Apparently I have great internal and external linkage and search engine recognition, but I’m not, ahem, terribly popular with the web crowd at large. (Why do I suddenly feel like I’m back in middle school and just been told I’m not invited to sit with the cool kids at lunch?)

Of course, being in the middle of renovations, my brain immediately translated my web-value number to all the new fixtures for the bathroom plus a on demand water heater. Not that I really think anyone would want to buy my little corner of cyberspace, but it made me laugh.

I’ll be glad when I can stop converting everything into dollar values.

If you want a great introduction to earthships and the mavrick architect behind them, I strongly recommend checking out the documentary film Garbage Warrior.

Garbage Warrior follows Michael Reynolds, founding father of earthships, over the course of three years in the U.S., India, and Mexico during the time in which Reynolds’ buildings came into his strongest conflict with New Mexico regulators.

Reynolds is passionate in his mission to develop radically sustainable housing.  And like most founding fathers of a movement, he is both a charismatic and exceptionally committed to his personal vision.  To quote one reviewer: “Garbage Warrior is above all an intimate portrait of an extraordinary individual and his dream of changing the world.”

Copies of the DVD can be purchased through Earthship Biotecture or through the Sundance Channel on iTunes.

I introduced you to the H2Office floating office in a previous post.  Since then, the creative minds behind the project have continued to evolve the design concept.

Here are some of the latest renderings…

For additional information on the project, check out the H2Office website.

Michael Reynolds and Earthship Biotecture has done a great job of putting together some introductory earthship videos.  Included below are a few of the better ones.

I’m not sure how I first heard about earthships. I think it may have been several years ago through my brother, Chris, who has been interested in alternative and sustainable architecture long before I was. But, however it initially happened, my interest was rekindled when I came to stay with Charlie in New Mexico while the worst of the renovations to my house where being done.

Taos, New Mexico is ground zero for earthships. Their creator, Michael Reynolds, has lived in the area since the 1960′s. There are now three earthship communities established in the area.

Earthships are a form of radically sustainable architecture. Their basic building blocks consist of recycled tired packed with earth. Recycled cans and bottles are also frequently used to build walls, particularly interior ones, and also as decorative elements in the construction. On top of this are cement and stucco.

Earthships, with their large southern exposures, are designed to take advantage of solar gain. Their rammed earth walls that are surrounded with earth also provide thermal mass which continues to provide heat through the night.

One of the things that impresses me the most about these structures is how they manage water. The houses are designed to capture rain and snow melt on their roof, funneling it into large cisterns built into the structures. The cisterns gravity feed a water module that is equipped with a pump and filtration system to make it drinkable. Water that is used in the sinks, is then fed into the large planters into the house, providing another rough filtration system, and then used as water in the toilet. After the toilet, the water is contained and treated through a solar septic system, and then used a fourth time in exterior botanical areas. Generally a solar hot water system is tied to a propane on-demand heater to ensure hot water for showers. (One of my personal, must-have creature comforts.)

In terms of electricity, earthships use a photovoltaic / wind power system. The majority of lights and appliances inside an earthship run on DC power, as energy is lost when you convert from solar power to AC. However, AC outlets are also provided. During my stay in an earthship, I did not run into problems in terms of the amount of energy I was drawing from using either my laptop or the TV that was in the home.

I love that earthships are self-contained systems that generate their own heat and power. With their sprawl of plant cells, they also provide the ability to raise a substantial amount of your own produce.

But what also attracts me equally to earthships are their aesthetics. Interior earthship walls are almost always stucco, and frequently in the bright, southwestern colors I love. Glass bottles are frequently used for ornamentation, and end up lighting rooms in a prism of colors. Because all of the walls in an earthship are handshaped, there are often circular and curved walls which you don’t tend to find in more traditional homes. Rooms have a much more creative, organic feeling to me. And I adore the sunlight and extensive array of plants you find along the southern exposure of these homes.

Because several people I’ve spoken with recently have never heard of earthships, I’ve attached a gallery of images below to help you get a feel. The majority of these images come from the Earthship Biotecture website. If they seem like your kind of thing, I encourage you to check out their website. It’s the best online resource out there for learning more about earthships.

These structures really are amazing and can easily be adapted to a small-size home.