The Home Crowd

From the LongCountdown.com,

With earthquakes, tsunami’s, and various natural disasters happening on a seemingly monthly basis,  here’s one of Japan’s answers to providing temporary shelter after the fact.

So, for 150,000 yen (approx. 1400$) you get two 90 pound boxes of cardboard pieces.

Then, you begin assembling your cardboard igloo over a plastic sheet.

And provided that you have a couple of friends clad in painter’s outfits, you can neatly roof your highly flammable new bachelor pad.

And then, a wonderful silver tarp and duct tape along the seams waterproofs your shelter, so long as that rain falls perfectly vertically downward.

The only way this could be more comical would be if it was used as a prop in a Japanese game show.

• So…. It’s made of cardboard huh? Should smell real nice after rain hits it once, and your soggy walls cave in.
• Probably better keep this monster in your car, because if your permanent home caves in, crumbles in a heap of wood, steel, and concrete, it’s going to be quite the chore to unseat both of these 90 pound packages.
• Best use yet: plant a windmill on the front, and charge the neighborhood children to putt a golf ball through your front door.
• Oh, and it costs 1400 bucks.  To live in a glorified cardboard box.  You could easily find a water heater box for much less.  Actually, for 1400 dollars, you could BUY a water heater, live in the box, and with a little ingenuity have indoor plumbing with enough left over to buy a tankless water heater, and use it’s cardboard box as a den.

OR…..

There’s another recent development in temporary shelters, real cutting edge technology you may want to try.  They’re called Tents.  Very hard to find (Wal-Mart, target, drugstores, basically anywhere), but if you can manage to track one down, you’ve got a temporary shelter which repels rain, weighs only a few pounds, and if you’ve spent a hundred bucks on one, you’ve likely bought the family size.  Someone should have tipped off those cardboard guys..

Check out the story, and many more great pics at Longcountdown.com.

I see from time to time these quirky stories of world’s smallest house. This one, in Toronto, however, I see pop up the most.

Estimated at around 300 square feet and roughly 6 feet wide at the interior, the home is on the market for somewhere between 170-180K. Seems like alot for something that looks as if it started off as a shed for the brick home on the right there.

On the plus side, now you’ve got a reason not to go all out with a giant plasma tv, as it may not fit on the wall. Behind that wall is the bathroom, kitchen, and at the rear is the bedroom. The bedroom sports a murphy bed which couldn’t possibly fit any tighter.

Seems tight… Don’t suppose a young married couple in a starter home could get along with sleeping in bunk beds? Perhaps these from a previous post?

Anyhow, also found on youtube was this news clip of the home when it was previously up for sale in 1993. The bathroom looks to be the trickiest part as taking a seat on the commode would be like trying to fit in your old high school desk with that sink positioned where it is.

More pics here at Joeydevilla.com

Similar pics here at TeamSugar.com, as well as a floor plan at the bottom of the article.

I stumbled upon a scan earlier today from the May 1962 issue of Playboy magazine of the “Playboy Townhouse” for the affluent, on-the-go, bachelor.  It’s a beautiful rendering done by Humen Tan (I really hope that’s not his/her real name) of a design commissioned to designer R. Donald Jaye by playboy to highlight the swingin’ bachelor lifestyle.  This great example of 60’s modern life is captured in this article with furnishings and furniture for which some have remained stylish and modern decades later.

The section of the townhouse highlights the spatial and elemental qualities of the townhouse…the central pool, the open air under a retractable skylight, the teak wood paneling, and lots and lots of concrete.  This rendering also explains the space usage by it’s contents, most of which were specified in the townhouse article.

Note that the servants quarters at the bottom right are not furnished, seeing as how no bachelor outside of Bruce Wayne should be living in the city with a butler anyhow.  Also, a modern design feature that would be scrubbed first after the first estimate is the concrete waffle slab used for the floors.  They might as well have put the garage on the roof as strong, overbuilt and expensive as that would be.  But they’re dreaming out loud, so we’ll side with artistic license on that one.

And what better bachelor bed that the rotating playboy bed, highlighted in an earlier article of the magazine.  Great spot for entertaining ‘guests’, it rotates 360 degrees to face the fireplace or the television with built in conveniences such as telephone, refrigerator and bar.  And who wouldn’t want to watch some TV on that mammoth 21-inch screen.  They didn’t specify what kind of TV it was, but I do vaguely recall George Jetson calling Mr. Spacely over it from time to time.

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I’ve seen Esquire’s list of “75 skills every man should master” around a few times lately, and though I’d chime in, seeing as how…

1. It’s a great list
2. Esquire’ is a men’s magazine, but certainly women can master these skills as well. Thing is, the main reason men are mastering these skills is to impress the ladies. Let us have that, huh?
3. There’s some quality home-related skills most of us should brush up on. If you haven’t learned them, it’s a great reminder.
4. It was time for a new list, as mine has grown stale (see below)

Understandably, some of us just won’t have the drive to take on the entire list, and some items you just wouldn’t care for anyhow. But here are some of the relevant entries I took note of.

14. Chop down a tree. Know your escape path. When the tree starts to fall, use it.

(Also, chop down a tree in good weather, My first experience was chopping down our xmas tree in 2 feet of snow. The trunk, was frozen, and halfway through I’d only wished that santa would bring me a chainsaw….right then)

15. Calculate square footage. Width times length.

(Perfectly useful if you’re measuring a rectilinear space. Not a useful explanation. Instead, find the floorplans and your tape measure, for more help, see the explanation here at about.com)

16. Tie a bow tie.

(There was an explanation with that one, but it’ll never happen, not with me, not without a tux. That’s one fashion don’t that’s about as dead as a hitler-esque moustache)

7. Cook meat somewhere other than the grill.

Buy The Way to Cook, by Julia Child. Try roasting. Braising. Broiling. Slow-cooking. Pan searing. Think ragouts, fricassees, stews. All of this will force you to understand the functionality of different cuts. In the end, grilling will be a choice rather than a chore, and your Weber will become a tool rather than a piece of weekend entertainment.

(Julia Child??? What century was this writer born in? Granted, a master grillmaster who can bend a vegan’s will is certainly bound for greatness. However, I haven’t seen a cookbook without Rachel Ray’s face plastered over it in years.)

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He might as well, it doesn’t seem as if he’ll be driving anywhere soon.

After recent rains near the Illinois river. Good thing is, he built on a high spot.

(From Bits & Pieces)

Now what kid growing up didn’t dream of having a hidden passageway in their house.  Damn near every episode of scooby doo had one, and just as many movies with spooky mansion were required to sport a hidden passageway.

I’d always thought it’d be great someday when I built a house that it would have a hidden passageway, but would probably be more of a do-it-yourself task than I was prepared to take on.

Fortunately, Creative Home Engineering of Tempe, Arizona has taken on the task of manufacturing different types of passageways, and thus saving ourselves from disastrous cabinets which would likely come off its hinges on the eighth use and landing squarely on our feet.  However, I believe it’s common knowledge that you can sustain acceptable balance with at least 7 toes.

Maybe you have that den/home office which has become so overgrown with clutter that it’s become an eyesore to all who walk past it.  Well, a hidden passageway would cover that up nicely.  More importantly, in these times where home invasion robberies are more and more frequent, the prospect of a more secure hiding space could be quite valuable.  Sure you’ve got that fire-proof safe, and it’s tucked in the closet somewhere, only to be quickly discovered.  But it’s so heavy!  Who could lift it?  Yeah, it’ll take a couple of people, they won’t press their ear against your safe and crack it right there.  They will lift it out, if not hook it up to the tow hook of the getaway car and drag it outside, load it up, and crack it open later.

From the pictures above, the quality of workmanship already looks better than the commercial door hinges I’d likely try to force onto my own passageway.  The picture below, I find very entertaining, as it reminds me of The Munsters, lacking of course, “spot”, the fire breathing dragon/monster/creature living under the stairs.  But instead, it’s a nice hiding spot in a split-level home.

From Creative Home Engineering (via BallerHouse)