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Section Six
CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL THRIFT STORE
So what happened was, to recount a little a bit, I had this picture
in my mind of this young couple or young family coming through the
woods and seeing this home and this home was theirs.
So that broke me up and my mind went into hyper drive or
light-speed or whatever you want to call it and for three days,
virtually nonstop, ideas were going through my mind.
One of the things that we already had an idea of with a man
at a Church near us was a salvage storage area.
This church has what they call a quarter store it’s a thrift
store, everything in it is a quarter.
You can go in there and find a $200 suit, a $500 suit a
quarter for each article of clothing.
So I came up with the idea of a salvage thrift storage yard.
When you go into construction sites, there are tons and tons
of construction material that’s thrown away, let’s stock it up.
So in different areas, in different counties, we’ve got
within an hour or two drive let’s say you have a storage yard for
salvage and it’s a bishop storehouse.
All things in common if you need something you come in and
get it. You might pay
$1.00 maybe $10.00 for something.
So you have that idea.
You have people doing that; so Ok, there’s going to have to
be somebody running that yard taking care of it, supervising it.
Maybe it’s on somebody’s property where they can keep an eye
on it. You have people
that are out doing construction, gathering these materials.
The commercial dumpsters that are 20-ton capacity the big
green or purple dumpsters go to construction sites and are filled
with wood and a lot of good stuff in them.
That stuff can be salvaged and brought to the yard.
So this is a package deal where everybody can do something.
A working example is all the HABITAT FOR HUMANITY stores
around.
“I WILL WORK FOR HOUSING”
There’s a job for virtually everybody.
And here’s the deal.
As people participate they can have a home built for them.
In other words we can run an ad in the big papers in the
areas where we want to do this “You may qualify for a free home.”
People respond and say “how can I qualify for a free home?”
Well, help us out.
You can tithe to this ministry, this organization; send
money. Let’s set the
value of one of these homes at $10,000, since that should cover the
value of 10 acres. So we
can trade a home for a garage or a barn, or an office.
What about youth groups?
Let’s say they want a retreat center.
Let’s say they have land where those can be built on so we
set aside some homes on the property.
Let’s say the church has 500 acres; we set aside 50 acres as
home sites, which is enough for 5 homes.
Then we build a retreat center there.
A family that has property for trade for the land, we’ll
build them another home there and they could run a bed and breakfast
or let’s say they have in-laws come quite often they could have a
separate home for the in-laws, so the in-laws wouldn’t be
encroaching on their personal territory or personal space.
There are endless possibilities.
Youth camps, seminars why not build a home for and have a
home paid for your children.
This is great motivation.
Let’s say a young man is 15 years old.
So he has 5 years to have a home built for him.
I think $10,000 to $12,000 is a reasonable amount so that if
someone has land or he or she has the money.
One gentleman I know is an air traffic controller so he has
money to pay for a home perhaps.
Someone who works a good job and they don’t have the time or
ability to build a home, maybe they're a little bit older or don’t
have the manpower. So a
small construction company could go around and oversee the building
of homes at a retail value of $12,000.
Now every 10th home they build they tithe a home to the
system, the Eagle’s Wings program where that home is set-aside for
people to come home to the area to live in.
So there are a lot of applications there.
So what are the different positions that need to be filled?
Obviously a system would need to be set up to take care of
money. Maybe a treasurer
or a board, somebody who is trustworthy is needed.
In the New Testament book of Acts, people sold land and what
did they do with the money?
They laid it at the apostle’s feet.
The apostles were trustworthy men.
So the bishop’s storehouse concept is that these are
trustworthy men, the money can be brought in and “deposited” and
somebody needs to keep track of that so you need a treasurer, an
accountant. At this
point, I would like to touch on the Amish practice of the
fundraising person. Why
not have someone who would go around and collect money for the
program? We desperately
need at this late hour, motivational speakers.
We need a lot of these people.
We need speakers who will tell the truth about the future and
who will pleadingly convince people to get out of the cities, out of
Babylon. We need
apostolic speakers who will convince people to invest in the kingdom
of God instead of a 401k or a New Cadillac or a bigger condo or
mansion. They need to
speak in the big cities as well as going to different communities.
Webmasters, web designers, people that could put up a website
for this is one thing I want to get done; put it on the Internet.
There are websites already in existence that have to do with
communities. They list
quite a few. There’s one
website in particular that’s kind of nuclear oriented, survival
oriented. The man that
does the website built the largest survival shelter in the world.
They concrete reinforced scooped out earth movers, scooped
out enough dirt to then bury it in concrete rein versed a roof over
I think it was 40 school buses so that turned into a very large bomb
shelter. So he lists
quite a few retreats or communities in Missouri, northeastern
Oklahoma etc. So there’s
the aspect of a fundraiser, webmasters, accountant/treasurer,
salvage gatherer, salvage storage area caretakers or overseers.
Small construction companies are needed that can go around
and build the homes. The
list goes on and on. We
need people to haul materials, equipment operators, salvage people,
salvage operators, management, and promotions.
We must have people that advertise, and get the idea out
there. We need to go to
churches and speak; we need sales representatives; it needs to be
sold. It’s an idea that
people need to hear.
It’s like you need to hear preaching; you need to have it spoken to
you from the Lord.
TYPES OF ACCEPTABLE ENERGY EFFICIENT HOMES
We know for a fact through our business that there are thousands and
thousands of people that want to get out of the cities and just
don’t know how to do it.
There’s a lot, carpenters obviously, metal workers, just any
number of things that can go on and on and on.
The types of buildings that could be built would be like I
mentioned before even tornado shelters, somebody may want an office
built, a barn, a garage, a workshop, a classroom for a school or a
church. Even a home
schooling family might want a separate office built so there’s allot
of different ways to go with that.
At this point we need to talk about the type of structures
that I would see being necessary.
COB CORDWOOD UNDERGROUND EARTHBAG EARTHSHIP CEB ETC
What we’re looking at is a combination of several earth sheltered,
earth friendly designs.
Cob is a mixture of sand, clay and straw.
The word means “round mass.”
You are making a giant mud-daub house.
Typically they seem to have standardized on 18-inch thick
walls. With cordwood,
you take pieces of firewood, basically 18 inches long You see the
sawed piece of wood on the inside and outside There's usually 5
inches of mortar at the outside and 5 at the inside and the interior
filled in with sawdust and lime.
You can use the cob mixture as the mortar.
Then you’re not paying for cement, as I mentioned earlier.
You have an 18-inch wall; it would go up a lot faster.
Cob takes time to dry; if you can imagine 18 inches of mud
basically it takes an incredibly long time to dry, In other words
you put up a course of say 6 to 8 inches of cob, it may be a week
before that’s dry.
Cordwood you can keep going around and around the building and you
can continue to work. It
dries a lot quicker. In
fact they put soaking wet sawdust in their mortar to keep it from
drying out too fast and cracking.
I see a combination of that.
“THE EARTH IS MY INSURANCE; MY HOME IS COVERED BY IT”
There is another type of earth sheltered home.
Mike Oehler wrote a book The $50 and Up Underground Home.
In 1971, he built himself an underground that he says cost
him $50 in materials.
Later on he did a $500 “palatial” addition, and he’s still living in
this home 30 years later.
So he fairly well brainstormed it, as has Rob Roy with the
cordwood and Yanto Evans and Linda Smiley with the cob.
There’s different people that have done Cob and different
people that have done cordwood, but they’ve been perfected.
They know how to do the roofs; they do earth sheltered roofs.
Rob Roy tends to do with the cordwood 12 inches of dirt on
the roof because he’s looking at it as just thermal insulation,
whereas Mike Oehler is looking at it as nuclear radiation insulation
so Oehler tends to go for three to four feet of dirt.
So looking at a combination would be an actual idea for a
home. Mike Oehler uses
what is called Post Shoring Polyethylene (PSP).
So if you can picture earth sheltered homes where basically
the front of it is accessible to the south and that’s kind of what
we’re looking at. Fifty
to ninety percent being earth sheltered depending on the conditions
and the time, terrain and everything else.
But what we’re looking for is a great deal of the house to be
earth sheltered. So how
do you do that? Well in
a recent issue of Backwoods Home there was an article about “earth
sheltered homes” and these earth-sheltered homes that were featured
were done by Davis Caves it’s a company that does underground homes.
They’re doing concrete, steel-reinforced concrete.
Mike Oehler calls these people concrete terrorists.
He says you end up with steel reinforced concrete so you end
up living in a faraday cage.
There are radiations, frequencies throughout the universe
that the human body was created to absorb.
He says created or evolved, but the human body is meant to
absorb those and so when you’re living in a metal building you’re
prevented from that. And
that’s not that big of a deal, it may be, it may not be I don’t know
but it’s an interesting thought.
A faraday box is something that was discovered and built for
a very specific reason - to prevent frequencies from penetrating.
The big difference is the Davis Caves homes cost 20 percent
more than a conventional home.
This is very expensive.
Mike Oehler’s homes on the other hand, he contends, are just
as good if not better.
They are far more ascetically pleasing to the psyche, to the mind
and emotions because he has a lot more balance in the getting of
air, view, and light into the home from different points.
So let’s say we use his method.
You dig a hole in the ground and put the post in.
This is the corner, and also about every 6-8 feet, I think he
does. So to prevent
deterioration of that post you could go with very expensive lumber
that is treated. You
could use that lumber if you wanted.
It’s treated with chemicals that may perhaps outgas, I don’t
know. Oehler’s very
cheap very simple solution is to take a rough-cut timber out of the
forest and you char it over a fire.
That’s going to prevent any bugs from getting in there.
So you burn it; he tells you about a quarter of an inch of
charring on that thing as you turn it in the fire.
Then, you wrap it with garbage bags: one, two, three or
whatever. And this has
all been tested. He
knows that it works.
Then you put that in the ground and compact it in really good.
Then you’ve got a vertical beam or post.
Then from post to post you put in whatever kind of wood
you’ve got. This is
shoring which means a material that keeps dirt and rocks from caving
in. So let’s say you
want to build a wall you put in shoring.
This could be pallet slats or 4x8 sheets of plywood.
It could be whatever material you have at hand there, that is
cheapest and easiest to go with.
It could even be the mill end or rough cut from a sawmill.
So you have your shoring in.
Then you’re going to put in polyethylene for waterproofing.
That polyethylene does not have to be UV grade so it can be
fairly inexpensive. In
other words UV grade meaning greenhouse polyethylene, which it is
never going to see the sunlight so it’s not going to get
deteriorated by the sunlight.
So just use regular black polyethylene.
He’ll usually put cardboard in there to protect the plastic
as you put the dirt against it.
And that can be upgraded.
You could use 2 layers of polyethylene.
The next thing would be a PSP or a Post Shoring Polyethylene
wall. Let’s say around
60percent if it’s a 20-foot wide, 30-foot long you’ve got then a 600
square foot building.
With 100 linear feet of circumference to deal with so you’re rear 60
percent is post shoring polyethylene and it’s earth sheltered.
He has all kinds of other things that can be applied there.
Then the front part that would be exposed would be a
combination of the cordwood and using cob as mortar so again these
are materials that are indigenous.
They’re handy, there and ready to go.
No expense virtually.
As far as the roof, goes, the roof would be earthen.
These technologies have been used for 30 some years and again
polyethylene can be used.
It does not have to be UV grade.
Use straw or cardboard as a buffer when you go from one
material to the next, to protect the poly from your planks.
If you have tar paper available then you tarpaper, use some
sand, the polyethylene, some straw, four inches of dirt, another
layer of polyethylene, and then 12 inches or 3 feet of dirt.
Then, seed it and plant it and you can have a garden up
there. So that gives you
good thermal mass and protection from heat and cold as well as
radiation. Like I said,
Mike Oehler likes the three to four feet of dirt.
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