Build my home: Using wood instead...

Hello Everybody,

new houses in Panama are now selling for about 60.000$! Beside you will have thousands neighbours with an identical one. Still trying to get something cheaper, but also durable, secure and stable. Anyway, if you use this text as a tutorial for you own house, and then die, it is not my fault, I know little about calculation of structure, so this is on your own risk. Anyway Im happy for any inspiration this construction give.

Some conclusion I got from my first try, is that working with mesh seems to be better for "round" things then for straight once. So having several curved teak trees in my piece of land, I decided to convert them into a house, and to give the walls done with a mesh a second try. A bit inspired by the very beautiful "hobbit"- house from simon dale.

I put the house a bit in the earth, on south direction to have earth temperature, instead of sun temperature on south side.

The trees have a diameter of about 5-15 cm. In total about 45 threes, that should make a line of about 500 meters. If you do not have, no problem teak plantation will neither charge much for it, or even give it away for free, as they want the big, and straight once without curves. After removing the bark they need some month of drying. I had them outside, so some moisture put them black, but that did not affect, instead give a nice texture :-)

Then on a dry day we put LaroSUR, an impregnation oil to protect them. Actually you can repeat the several times, and the wood keep sucking it. So at the end I paid about 800$ in about 16 gallon of this. I stretch it with vegetable oil (50:50), no idea if this is a good or bad idea. But the idea of oil is that the wood stops sucking water, what makes it affect able for mushrooms, and insects. There are cheaper things, but if you live there you want something that do not kill you. Teak, especially the heart already has some water resistance. Preparing all the trunks takes a person about a month and a half to do so.

With a distance of about a meter we make a circle and used 25 columns for the outer wall. The foundation of each column is about a meter deep filled up with concert, the trunks have at the bottom three bars of steal that goes into the trunks and to the bottom of the foundation, terminating in the form of a "L". The trunks are about 30 cm inside of the concrete. That gives good stability, but I think it was a bad idea, because the concrete in the earth gets wet, and if the wood will get wet too, so the wood can get rotten. We have put tarred brown paper around, but did not got completely sealed. So I made little holes in the wood and put as much impregnation oil in the wood as possible. .. and hope that the goods mushrooms and termites will have mercy with me. in other words, better keep the wood over ground-level.

The basic frame was done in about a month, stairs and details took another two month, all done by two persons

Here are the different ways we used for connecting the trunks. Option 1) is quite easy with the motor saw, it helps, but we normally used it with option 2) that is putting a steal bar. A good thing to keep in mind is that steal is about 5 times stronger then wood. Option 3) is sometimes the only option, for example if you want to put a trunk in a horizontal position between two columns. In the illustration the grey things are nails, and the black is a plate. Just in case used option 2 and 3 together.

The structure is, what I think, quite stable so I put in a second floor. The space of the house is about 45 square meter at the bottom and another 20 square feet at the top, 65 square meter in total. Kitchen, living room, bath and two rooms.

really love the round windows and doors. At the end we stabilize the whole construction. with several diagonal supports

With this pictures you can get an idea how we made the walls. First we nail a horizontal bar of steal every 80cm. Then we put a hexagonal wire, and finally a metal mesh. Before smearing it with concrete we put carton
from the other side to avoid that the concrete "fall off".

Te cartoon need to be firm we connect it with the mesh using a wire and some strips to press the cartoon against the wire.