Re: Chinese drywall again.

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Oh boy! I will refer to your last paragraph. Well, I am one of your so called ignorant average home buyers in the US. You are probably very young, naive and not from the USA. I have bought a dozen homes and I have been able to succcessfully live and sell them at a profit. We usually can trust our home inspectors and home builders with the process of buying a home. But this is different. You need to educate yourself and visit a few of these homes. All of the homes were not the builder grade first home buyer homes you were referring to. There are homes in my area that are in million dollar subdivisions that have this drywall. Pleeeaasse, this is wrecking peoples lives.

No, you will not refer to my last paragraph. You will refer to my entire post or you will be shown to be a fool. But then, your ignorance betrays you.

I have designed thousands of building projects all over the world for more than 30 years for some of the largest builders and private individuals that you have heard of.

Even after being involved with a dozen homes you publicly admit your ignorance. Very well. I have seen these homes, many of them, and not one of them was built by a concerned builder attentive to details as circumstances require, otherwise this chinese drywall fiasco would not have occurred.

Learn the phrase, "caveat emptor", it is alive and well here in the good ol' USSA and if you choose to be ignorant of that fact as well then you have a bumpy road before you.

If you cannot do the heavy lifting required to build a new home then maybe you should invest your time and effort elsewhere. By heavy lifting I mean making the decisions and accepting the responsibility of those choices.

It has become way to fashionable of late for people to run their mouths then shift blame, as your post has so eloquently illustrated.

Not quite. You're not listening to the guy, and this has nothing to do with whatever experience you have on unrelated stuff. You made several points which were loose on logic, and Daysta took issue with just a couple. I take issue with basically all of your points, but I have the heating system* apart and winter's a-comin', so I'll have to rip you a new one later. =3D:O

• Working on steam systems is fun!

The very first home I bought was an older home that needed fixing up and I was young and dumb and thought I could do it all. It was wired for aluminum but an addition was wired with copper and the house had sat vacant for a year, which is not good to do in high humidity Florida. On moving in day I threw the main breaker and started moving furniture in. About 30 minutes into it my house caught fire, from a *chemical reaction* at the union of copper/aluminum wires to the water heater. I learned several things that day.

same

Things have been complicated all along Ken thats why legal mechanisms are in place for intelligent people to reach beyond their own expertise. An intelligent person recognizes his limitations and hires competent people with experience in the respective field(s) to deal with the things he is unable to. No one can be an expert at everything, cept Rico of course. ;-)

Stop right there. If you trust building codes you deserve what you get because those people cannot be held accountable.

because

It doesn't *shift* anywhere, it stays right where it was from the beginning.

I think its the person(s) that signed the contract, be that builder, developer, self, etc. What you are seeing here is a lot of people trying to avoid responsibility, surprise-surprise, most likely because the repair will be very expensive, far beyond just the cost of replacing drywall, especially with reference that a majority of the house inflicted with malady being massive quanities of cheap builder homes where the cost to value ratio is so low. In Cape Coral, Florida, right now, there are over 1000 of these cheezy homes on the records with this drywall flaw and its estimated the cost per home will be over $10k but with the property values de-valued to the range of $40-80k it doesn't make sense to replace the drywall. The land these homes are sitting on is worth more than the houses. These houses sold for more than $100k in the past 5-6 years. Now, they can't give them away so they sit vacant, abandoned. (In 2005 the largest builder in Cape Coral, "1st Homes", built more than 5300 homes there and all of them were what I previously described. The owner of 1st Homes, sold the business to the

Question for the day: Whom is responsible for *allowing* faulty drywall into the country in the first place?

Was wondering where you'd been. Yes, I want to hear your take on all of this. FWIW, I'm not unsympathetic to the plight but I see a lot of emotionalism being dumped into this thing and I think logic is the rule. People are responsible for this and I hope the right people are held accountable.

Be careful, steam blisters can wreck you for a long time, double, no, triple check everything.

You just about lost me with 'sell them at a profit' and 'a dozen homes'. F*ck that.

cess of buying a

Keyword: 'Usually'. And i'm not even sure it's usually. F*ck that.

Million dollar homes? That still seems like "builder-grade" and maybe more so. F*ck that.

What a spiritually lost society we "live" in.

I hope the sulfur or whatever corrodes everything and the kitchen sink.

This on the heels of my natural building educational venture. (Hey, I came across mention of that 'Shelter' book.) I'll be an "archy" yet, if not "legally". ;) Maybe we should ALL be. Like in the old world. (Oh! My new education is showing. ;)

Looks like a good book... I'm curious to know what my e-library download offers. It might have stuff like that. I'm at 70% downloaded with my fingers crossed. I've been very lucky so far with all my bit torrent downloads. There seem to be some hands-on natural-building apprenticeships advertised online that I'm thinking about. Straw bales can be load- bearing and cob looks surprisingly viable. They've done some kind of cob snack/popcorn stand in Stanley park in Vancouver, incidentally, and cob has successfully withstood rigorous earthquake tests at UBC. The word 'cob' still makes me think of those little mini corn-cobs (the kind that get marinated) throughout a mud-mix decorating a house's walls. You can also add manure as a binder. "Man, your walls look like s*it... Hey, WTF are those little cobs doing in there?" Personally, I like the idea of mix-and-match, using timber-frame with some aesthetic elements of cob, straw-bale, cordwood, stone and glass, depending on region and local availability. Some of the homes I'm seeing online are just gorgeous and seem to put developer stuff beneath shame. Did you know that straw bales are also very good at insulating? Not really surprised, but still... and the thickness of the walls lend the inside of the homes to sumptuousness, conducive to co-mingling 'n' fun Ken-like stuff.

I give the one-finger salute to Chinese drywall.

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So I hear. I wonder how effective "mingling" with a female code inspector might be in this regard.

Joke aside, post-and-beam-timberframe plus strawbale for insulation may prove of little worry code-wise and what little siding there might be among the glazing could be done in rough-cut wood (the sweet- looking wavy bark-left-on type). Also, progress is being made on the codefront in many natural building regards, thanks to "pioneers", and from what I can glean, Vancouver seems more up on code-flexing where sustainability's concerned.

I've read a little about portable saw mills, by the way, where one can mill their own wood... presumably outside of a tight subdivision.

Agreed. In this current economy it is insanity to be financially involved with a dozen houses, just my opinion. F*ck that.

rocess of buying a

No, the keyword was *trust*. F*ck that. Business progresses with *contracts*, thats why they exist. The OP should learn that, while s/he can.

Its not about quantity, its about quality. Million is relative. Sometimes you get what you pay for. "You can't *buy* good construction but you can *supervise* it.

--gs, 2000

Agreed.

I hope it caves in and kills everyone within.

Straw bales, as well as much of this other eco-friendly nonsense is NOT lead bearing. They must either be, 1) enhanced greatly at great expense, or 2) used as filler material. The stuff I've looked at, over a multi-decades period, is always filler. I'm delving into decorative concrete and corn cobs, sawdust, ground up packing styrofoam, etc., is used as filler material, along with portland, sand, etc. to create a light weight concrete mix. Straw or hay is prganic and thus will deteriorate over time unless properly treated, not to mention the attraction of bugs and all sorts of other vermin. And don't forget the process by which the bales themselves are created, which is not the sanest method - all sorts of nasty s*it gets bailed up in them things, dead animals, poisons, fertilizers, etc. All in all I don't see an advantage with the stuff and finally they are square footage intensive and very heavy, around 60-80 lbs each. Try to stack some up to wall height sometime, I dare ya! LOL

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It depends when/where/how I think, but it has ostensibly been used as such. Doubtful, but maybe part of the load in some of that context is borne by some kinds of plaster as well (and maybe the plumbing too-- haha just kidding). My attitude/approach to it would unlikely be load-bearing anyway as I'm still on timberframepostandbeam(tm). I checked the straw bale construction Wikipedia entry, btw. Apparently it's an American invention. Good for you. Something to be proud of in a world of diminishing returns, if I use the term correctly.

I think so. I suppose, like timberframepostandbeam or any other natural/green building, expense is relative and arguable. If we agree that we're going rural, then my farming friend just next door with a houseload of lovely leftover straw versus Faceless Overseas Inc., with some weird plastic pumped stuff, guess who's going to get my business?

Tough crowd. (|:) (hard hat)

Well then how do they do it? There *is* straw bale architecture out there, and very nice examples too. Architecture can be made out of practically anything it seems, including Chinese drywall. Give me a dead earwig or fly in among the fibres filling my Truth Window over that or asbestos anyday.

I do notice the folks in the YouTube vids struggling with the bales :) but so what. I'm becoming well-aware that natural building is not as relatively easy to build as, say, stick-frame, but I doubt that's its point, or maybe it kind of is in a way, insomuch as "what you input here might save you somewhere out there" and vice-versa-- cost-benefit analyses, but *real* C-B A, not Synthetic Dreamhomes Inc.'s greenwash kind.

No one told me that mixing manure, urine, blood, "cereal leftovers" and/or mud in with the homes we might live in (and might have lived in elsewhere in aeons past) would be part of it, and possibly one of the healthiest ways to build. Regarding most of your fair points, here's a rep sample (strawbale . com) from a few quick digs: "I get a lot of questions about bugs and mice in bale walls. I understand... the image of a stack of bales in a barn usually conjurs images of a few mice and a handful of bugs; however, bales in a wall are very different than bales in a barn. The biggest difference is that the walls are covered in plaster and stacked very tightly. The plaster is the first line of defense against pests. The thickness of the plaster makes it very hard for mice and bugs to get in. If they were to get in, they would have a hard time negotiating the tight bale network. A loose stack of straw allows for bugs and mice to move freely while the densely stacked walls resist the movement of such pests... Termites and other bugs do not go after the straw. It is a waste product with no real food value for the termites."

I have also read counters that suggest that your standard stick-frame leaves far more room for pest-negotiation. I have also read that cob, for example, if recalled, due again to thick and well-sealed-yet- breathable plasters, are superior in preventing pests. Good against fires too, and when they (natural buildings) do manage to burn, they might do so relatively toxicity-free. So if you were too late in putting it out, you could at least toast marshmallows while you watch it burn down. And build again. Locally. With people you know.

Regarding your mix, how about straightup concrete/synth-free? You might have the right local ingredients right under your feet. I read something about concrete fly-ash and radon gas. Generally, much in the way of the toxic is of course very low in natural buildings.

Maybe it's supposed to fall off. I think the wavy stuff seen may have been without the bark. Hard to tell with some pics.

Perhaps you can use the bark, itself, for siding though. Good luck trying to keep it on in any case.

Good job. Like the link about the house I previously sent, I got to thinking that nature pretty much does all the work for us. The tables and houses that appear closest to nature, seem to practically design and build themselves.

We caught wind of it even up here in Ottawa. So *you're* the guy. Fantasic... Wait 'till our local mayor finds out. I think he'll want to pay you and your table a personal visit just to see what all the fuss is about. ;)

Ok, everything's off. Cancel the reception.

Just do like that priest in Pierre's recent joke, but with some context-specific changes.

Makes sense.

I suspected as much, but was curious if 'power freex' was a trade name or something or if you meant something additional by it.

I was unaware what a pen blank was until today. It's the body or part of a pen that you screw or snap into the rest of it? You sealed the skin inside the acrylic too? While I appreciate the gesture, do you think you might be able to do a pair of custom knitting needles? :) As you might recall, I knit, but am using pens less and less. Some of the custom knitting needles out there-- in various materials-- are very nice and, for example, I've even seen ones that are lathed(?) (or however they make them) from different colored plywood glued together for a funky stepped rainbow wooden look. Have you ever or can you lathe bamboo? I have a pair of bamboo ones already-- they're the one's I'm using right now for my first sweater ever-- but still... and I'm also just curious. If you're motivated, go to Google Images and enter keywords, 'custom knitting needles' or something. You can put different shapes on their ends, either as part of the material of the needle, or as a completely different add-on.

Not really, although I can see how it might be modified to be quite nice.

From what I understand and can glean, Quonset is simply based on the name of the place they initially made them, and that how good your own Quonset is, such as with fires, etc., depends on how it's made. Are there things about a Quonset, such as its shape, that make it stand above other designs for you? Personally, I'm unsure I like the design, but maybe you have a view on it that could make it something palatable? (Actually, a natural-built Quonset might have something to it if done well.)

For example, I keep referring back (on my own time) to the subject (woodsman's cottage) of the link I posted, in part because it seems to embody many of the things I like. It's hardly a compromise between; cheap, local, independent/community-build potential, attractive, strong, flexible/expandable, efficient, fast/easy-to-build: Very simple round-log "cruck" frame, straw bale, cob/lime/wattle&daub plaster (I think), natural wood siding/flooring, good lighting, recycled elements (if recalled). I would expect creaking with this house, but why would creaks bother? It's the house speaking. Let it speak/warn of an intruder. I'm tempted to scoff at silent-house marketing and "glu-lam i-beams". Let's see if you can disassemble those glu-lam beams in 200 years and reuse them in the same way as the natural house, or if the glue doesn't send something else dubious out into the air. The more I look into "unnatural architecture", the more it appears a joke. Glad I didn't "get into architecture".

Whose tank?

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I've been reading about 'embodied energy', which, if understood, is a consideration of the energy required for the extraction, processing, shipment, etc., of a material until it gets to the home and is built into it. Metals apparently have very high embodied energy. They may also need it to be recycled. Energy uses resources.

The woodsman's cottage I refer to, you could practically build yourselves with just about everything you have on your property:

"Around the strangers moved, the shouts I felt within New panoramas seen (I loved it as it was). Forests of pylons built, the scaffolding is raised And how the men pursue their work They act convinced of freedom.

Crossed over by the bridge The brook was running ill We recognised the place - places we knew as children We wept upon the sight, and progress tore our hearts Fences divide the land, homes boxed like rabbit hutches..."

-- Goodbye to the village, by Killing Joke

Cool. How well do they work?

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With a frame like that? If I did it myself, sleep very soundly. The pitch might be too steep for 3' of snow to cling to, and the creaking might already be well-known and expected, such as during windstorms. My pipes would unlikely freeze, either. I'm Canadian afterall. We Canadians know-- or should know-- about water pipes and freezing. That house also has solar panels, one or two windmills, a stove and maybe a fireplace.

That cottage could handle any winter Canada could throw at it. It's already straw-bale insulation for one and/or could easily be adapted for a harsher CA winter-- like your Quonset.

Hardly, but so I've heard, but so what. I mean, you're building motorized wooden all-terrain vehicles. I'm as yet unconvinced in any case, especially if I include the sources of energy and infrastructure, and what labour etc., is required for those-- which, by the way, doesn't include the labour/ energy/resources that may be saved over generations with such a house, or the meaningfulness of such labours.