The +House is an “efficient home” concept I’ve been considering for quite a while, though unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to take much action on it yet. In future posts, I will go into more detail about what exactly the concept is and why it appeals to me. This post, however, is not about writing something new; this is just a direct transplant of two posts I wrote on the original +House website.
In early 2018, I began working to take the +House out of theory and into practice. It is a custom home concept, and rather an unusual one, so I wanted an online resource to which I could refer people — real estate agents, contractors, etc. — in order to make it easier to explain the idea clearly. I originally created a blog for this purpose.
Unfortunately, circumstances intervened (maybe someday I’ll tell the story of the Great Microsoft Re-Org of 2018), and for want of time I’ve had to put the +House project on hold. The original blog has been up for about a year and a half, but now that I have this website, I’d rather centralize all my content here than have it spread across two unrelated sites. With that in mind, I’ve decided to shut down the other blog and add the +House to this list of things I’ll write about here.
But I did have two posts on that original blog that I think are worth preserving, so I’ve copy-pasted them into the two subsections below. The first was largely a placeholder — I was still figuring out web tech at the time and needed a “test post” — but I had fun writing it and hope you’ll enjoy it as well. The second post was the “elevator pitch,” intended to communicate the essentials of the +House concept in as short a space as possible. As mentioned above, I’ll expound on the details of the idea in future posts; this one’s just for the record.
–Murray
Archive Post #1: Thirty Percent of My Income
Modern attitudes toward housing costs confuse me.
The way I hear it, we financially responsible adults today should expect to spend roughly 30% of our after-tax income on housing. According to modern conventional wisdom, that’s a very reasonable figure; but from an historical perspective, that number is absolutely bananas.
Building freestanding shelter was, quite literally, among the first things humans learned to do as a prerequisite to the development of civilization. There are stone block-forts in Europe that have been rent- and mortgage-free since the Neolithic period. The log cabin became a symbol of the North American West because it could be erected in a week by a single pioneer family. Throughout human history, most homes have been designed such that they could be cobbled together on short notice by a small team of complete amateurs with second-rate hand tools, no formal education, and optional sobriety.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia; this is one of the few photos on this site that I didn’t take myself.)
And yet today, according to conventional wisdom, we somehow find ourselves in a state where a full third of the economic output of humanity as a whole is required in order to ensure shelter. Admittedly, today’s residential experience has improved substantially since the log cabin days; but so has our productivity. I have no studies to back this up, but I suspect that if our ancestors had needed to spend a third of all their working time just struggling to keep the house from falling over, they would have never bothered to leave the caves.
Moreover, if one wants to construct new housing in this day and age, it quickly becomes apparent that “three half-sober guys with an ax” is no longer considered an adequate team to oversee the project. To be honest, that’s probably for the best. But even for a simple project, we seem to have replaced those three guys with a real estate agent, an architect, a structural engineer, a general contractor, a construction crew, a concrete specialist, an electrician, a plumber, an insulation specialist, a roofer, a painter, a landscaper, a small army of county officials, and an interior decorator. It’s possible we’re being a little extravagant.
And the upshot of our extravagance is that housing prices have become historically outrageous. (I am not claiming that housing prices are so outrageous as to be worthy of note by future historians; I’m merely reiterating that prices are outrageous relative to housing costs throughout human history.) Residence costs are maintenance costs, and as such they tend to aggressively constrain or reduce wealth-growing potential, particularly at lower income levels. However, the full socioeconomic implications are beyond the scope of my expertise and this tirade.
Ultimately, no matter how many times and ways I consider it, I am unable to convince myself that the modern attitude toward housing costs makes sense, at least for me. If one sees housing as an investment opportunity (and moreover, an opportunity attractive enough to merit constituting at least a third of one’s net worth), then perhaps these expenditures are less intolerable. But housing is not an investment vehicle for everyone. Some of us just want a place to live. Some of us would rather not have to spend a third of our waking hours paying for the cavalcade of specialists required to construct a basic modern home. Some of us don’t want or need such extravagance.
Some of us are just looking for something simple.
Archive Post #2: The +House
The +House is a 1600 square foot, two-storey, zero-cut container home built from eight 20′ shipping containers stacked two-high and arranged in the figure of a plus-sign. The house is unified by an octagonal central structure built using unspecified (but presumably traditional timber-based) construction techniques. The shipping containers are the only load-bearing components of the design, allowing the whole structure to rest entirely on sixteen concrete piers placed under the corners of the lower containers. These design elements should (in theory) make the +House inexpensive, simple, fast, sturdy, low-impact, low-maintenance, and suited to almost any plot of land that can contain a 50′ by 50′ footprint.
That’s it, that’s all there is to it! I believe there are a tremendous number of advantages to this design, which I’ll unpack in more detail in future posts. But the core idea is almost disappointingly simple, and that’s why I think it just might work.
(Note: this 3D model of the +House “shell” wasn’t included on the original website — not all hosting technologies make it easy to include 3D content — but it was created at the same time, and for the same purpose, so I think it’s in the archival spirit to include it here. It also might help to explain the structure outlined in Archive Post #2, which can be a little hard to visualize for those unfamiliar with container homes.)