Building Our Earthen Home Episode 2 : Design

Before we build a house, we need to decide a house. The best person, the most important person to decide the house is the owner of the house or the person who will live in that house. Because nobody knows better than the owner of the house what do they want. They know better what do they want. So if we have to build a house, we need to be involved with the designing of the house as much as we can. I'm not an architect. I have no background of architecture but because of 30 years of building, I have built so many buildings in my life. I did a lot of mistakes and in the same time I learned so many good things from building. I want to conclude my experience about how to design a house in my own way. It's not official way. It's not the way that architect did much. To build a house, the first thing is we need to ask ourselves, what do we want a house for? This is the most important question. Do we want a house to sleep only or do we want to work at home or do we want to have parties often or do we want to have a quiet place to meditate? We need to make decisions about this. What do we want from this house? If we have the clear decision already, the next thing is to go see another house, another building, research more, to see more, to see the real thing of each house. If we think about the room, three by three meters, sometimes we cannot imagine clearly. We need to see the real three by three meters room. We can see that. Is that big enough for what we need? That's very important to see the real room before we decide the house. If we go see another house, research more, we will know which part we like, which part we don't like. So that is the way we can collect all what we like together and then turn it into our house. It will be the best house. To decide a house, I have very simple principle. The first principle is think about make it easy. Easy to build, make it easy to build. When we decide the house to make it easy, it will make the house quite cheap. Whenever we make the house more complicated, more expensive, more material, more labor that we need to pay for, it's easy to live in that house. When we live in that house, we feel like we have a good flow in the house. We can go, we can use everything, very good flow. There's nothing block us while we use that house or live in that house. We feel very comfortable, very easy. Easy to fix. If the house have some problem or to clean the house, it have to be easy to fix. Some of the house, if you want to clean the window outside and the second floor, you need to looking for scaffolding. You need to hire some people to do it for you. That's harder. But if we decide to be able to go around the house, every part of the house easily, that's easy for us to take care of the house and easy to take it down. One day we need to take the house down. For me, I don't want to keep the house long, only my lifetime. The next generation, I want them to build their own house too. So it's important for next generation, for my son to build his own house because he can learn how to build. This is the way to transfer the wisdom, the technique, how to build a house from generation to another generation. When they build their house, they can develop the technique that we have to make it better and better. So humans will have another technique that make building a house easier and easier in each generation because natural building is so easy, very cheap. We don't need to think about to make it last very long. Even earthen house can last more than thousand years. If we have good foundation, good roof, it can last more than thousand years. But we don't expect to make it last that long. We want our kids to take it down and use our brick to build a new one, to have fun with it. So that's why I always think about how can we take it down easily. So easy is very important thing. The first priority of the design for me. The second principle is strong and safe. To make it strong and safe is very important thing. So we need to think about how to make it strong, how to make it safe. Because it's our house, we need to live in that house. If it's not safe, it's not a place for us to live. If it's not strong, it's more work for us to fix, to take care of it. And the next principle is cheap. To make it cheap, not too expensive. Because if the house too expensive, we have to be in debt sometime. To be in debt is a big suffering in our life. How can we make the house cheap is very important. Because if the house cheap, we have less worry. And then when we build in the cheapest way, we have to look around us. What kind of material around us that we can use to build a house. So we will buy the expensive material from far away less and less and less. We will use the local material more and more and more. So this house will be cheap in this way. And then when we fix it, we can fix easily because we use local material. We use material that we can find it easily. We can fix it easily. We don't need to get specialist to fix our house. That make it cheap. And the next thing is no waste, less waste or no waste. Some people, they decide a house to have a bedroom three by three meters. That's too big. So it wastes a lot of material cost and labor cost. There's one waste that people don't like to think about it much. It's waste of the time. If the bedroom three by three meters, you need to waste your time to clean that room for a long time. We maybe spend 15 minutes or half an hour per day. That's a lot of time. If we have to clean our bedroom every day, one year, we spend 30 minutes or 15 minutes per day every day. That's a lot of time that we waste to clean the bedroom. But if we make the bedroom smaller, two and a half meters by two meters, we maybe clean only three minutes or five minutes. So it saves a lot of time. So we have more free time to take a nap, to enjoy our life more. Or sometimes you make the house too big. You need to clean the house so much it costs more money too. This is a basic principle that I use to design my house. What we need to think about when we design the house. The first thing is think about wind and rain, especially when we live in tropical. The wind and the rain that we don't like the most that cause problem for us is the wind and the rain that come during May and June because it's a big storm. If it come this direction, we need to have hangover, the roof hangover wider to protect our house better. Or we need to plan to build, to plant some trees to block that side. It will make our house safe from the wind that will blow the rain into our house. March and April is the hottest time of the year. We need some breeze. We need to observe March and April which direction the breeze come from. If it come this way, we need to design our house to have door or window to be open, welcome that breeze. Because the coolness from breeze at that time of the year is so nice, so comfortable. It's a lot better than the coolness from air condition or from the fan. So we need to use that breeze as much as we can. That's why we need to observe the direction of the wind and the rain the whole year before we decide the house. The second thing is think about light, sunlight and light. In tropical, we don't want sunlight to hit our wall to come into our house because it's too hot. The hottest time of the day is afternoon until four o'clock. We need to observe which direction the sunlight come during this time of the day. We need to decide to have overhang, the roof overhang to prevent that or decide to plant something to block the sunlight but don't block the wind, don't block the breeze. So the tree have to be tall so we can have the leaf on the high area to block the sunlight but the bottom have to be open to let the breeze come into the house, let the light come into the house. We want light but we don't want sunlight because if the house have enough light we won't feel very very very comfortable to live inside. If the house don't have enough window, don't have enough light, it will be dark and more mosquito and no breeze. It's not nice to be in that room. When the room is dark, it have very big impact in our thinking. It makes us feel heavy, depressed. That's why when people have depressed feeling, they like to paint the room dark color. They like to close the door, the window, close the curtain because when they're depressed they want to sink into the sadness to depress. If we have the room more light, more open, it will help our thinking feel more open, relaxed and enjoy more, have more fun. This is very important part of the house to make our house very comfortable. But if you live in cold climate, it's opposite. You need more sunlight into your house. If you live in tropical, you don't sunlight to hit your house. If you live in cold climate, you need to design your house to have sunlight hit the wall or hit the room as much as you can. If the sunlight come this way, we need to have roof overhang shorter, have more glass window to welcome sunlight into our house as much as we can. And the floor next to the window where the sunlight hit, we need to have a concrete floor, earthen floor or tile floor, any floor that can be thermal mass so it can absorb the heat from the sunlight as much as it can. And then in the night time, that floor will release heat. When the sun sets, it releases heat inside the room. It makes the room warm longer so we can save energy in the cold climate. Sunlight is important, very important to think about in the cold climate. We need to harvest sunlight as much as we can. But in tropical, we need to block sunlight as much as we can. But both locations, tropical or cold climate, we need more light. The same, we need more light. So the best light in the room is when we get into the room, we don't need to turn on the light. That is the best light to save energy, to feel good. So when we design the good house, we will live in the house very long and enjoy our house a lot and feel relaxed. But if we make mistakes on the design, our house is not fun to be. It irritates our feelings so much. We will suffer a long time until we die or until we take down that house.