Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Domes

[Vinay Gupta (vinay]

Denise:
>I have limited experience with domes, mainly a few friends and 
>acquaintances who have lived in domes or who live in a dome now.  From 
>what they've told me, however, domes aren't always "half the cost" of 
>conventional structures.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that *all* domes were half the cost of
conventional structures.  Actually, most cost around the same.

Our domes cost about half of the equivalent conventional structure.
It's actually a little misleading to say that "flat out" - I feel like
I'd better justify the number a little.

Basically, our dome kits are fairly inexpensive, but not hugely
cheaper than equivalent kit houses of other kinds.  Where they make
up the "cost" is in the speed of building and the need for nothing
bigger than hand tools - no cranes or anything like that are required
for building the things.

So, if one is having the kit built by a contractor, the "total cost"
including labour is around 50% of the conventional home.  But if
one is doing most of the work oneself, it's not going to be all that
much cheaper: it just means you can finish the job that much more
quickly and move in.

>extra cost was mainly due to the additional time for the carpenters and 
>other workers to work with the unusual angles.  If you are building the 
>house yourself and don't count labor (and don't mind the extra time it 
>will take you), you don't have to account for this extra cost.

Some dome designs require enormous amounts of labour to finish the home,
but not all.

Really, the awful problems that people had with this kind of finishing
work resulted, in my humble opinion, from a trial and error process
of using different materials and techniques and hunting around for
one which worked with dome-style building.  

The "highly experimental" often leaked like sieves (Lloyd Kahn's early 
work and the "Drop City" domes) because they didn't use proper materials 
or sensible builder's savvy.  

This gave rise to Dome Myth 1: All domes leak.

The "highly conventional" ran into horrendous labour problems
because a technique like sheetrocking which evolved to meet the 
needs of conventional buildings failed badly on domes because the 
actual nature of the work was very different.

This gave rise to Dome Myth 2: Domes are too much work to build.

Most domes these days, not just the ones we make, are actually
pretty decent: people like Oregon and Timberline and Natural Spaces
(the big boys in the dome world) really produce quality house kits.

They're rather tied into some of the old-style doming approaches,
but a lot of experience has gone into those kits: they're not too
expensive and not too difficult to build right.

I'd recommend anybody interested in buying a dome kit to check out 
their websites or write them for information, because their packs are
very informative and dispell a lot of the myths far better than our
materials do and far better than I can do here.

vinay

Vinay Gupta
Worldview Livingspace