Underground House Plans

With the rising rate of home forclosures in the USA now and another tent city springing up somewhere around the nation every week, there are many ideas for alternative homes out there so that one can live "off of the grid".

One of the easiest DIY home plans I came across recently is details to build an underground house. The "$50 & Up Underground House Book" is a detailed DIY home plans book that gives step by step advice on building an eco-friendly green home on the cheap. Also explained in great detail is author Mike Oehler's revolutionary Post/Shoring/Polyethylene building method, which cuts building materials to the absolute minimum.

The $50 & Up Underground House Book teaches how to build the lowest cost, most sunshine-filled, best ventilated and driest underground houses of all. It teaches how to incorporate greenhouses, root cellars and fallout shelters into an underground home.

It covers both hillside and flat land design, and explains how to solve drainage problems with dependable gravity rather then expensive, failure-prone building materials. It also details ways to pass or otherwise deal with the building codes.

Read the book for yourself and imagine the greatest possibilities for lighting, ventilation and views in an underground home.

Where most owner-designers and even professional architects are stuck on the disastrous "First Thought" concept, a design which greatly limits view, sunshine and air flow, and which usually causes staggering drainage problems, Oehler offers the "Basic Design" with the "Up Hill Patio" which solves these problems and more.

He explains the weaknesses of the other three design concepts favored by conventional architects: skylights, vertical window wells and atriums.

For example, though skylights admit a rewarding amount of light, they are hard to use for ventilation and fire escape, get dirty quicker, often leak, admit too much of the summer sun, too little of the winter rays, and offer no view whatsoever.

They may have special applications, Oehler argues, but there are better design concepts for normal use.

Here's what Natural Life Magazine wrote about the book

"The ideas and methods are quite often unorthodox - but stronger for it. The design theory is well based in experience and appears to work well. Straightforward diagrams and black-and-white photos illustrate many construction and design points; a very useful and pleasant book for anyone wanting to build an inexpensive but solid underground structure."

Now in its seventh edition, it has sold more than 90,000 copies and has received enthusiastic reviews from Mother Earth News, National Public Radio and many others. Many consider it the classic in its field. The $50 & Up Underground House Book reprises all these advantages, and more. The book discusses in detail more than 50 different topics related to underground construction.

Download Underground House Book

This big, 112-page, 8 1/2" x 11" book contains

* 4 pages of engineering tables and diagrams
* 8 floor plans
* 54 photos
* 100+ illustrations

Chapter 1: What an Underground House Is Not
Chapter 2: What an Underground House Is - 23 Advantages
Chapter 3: Histories of the $50 and $500 Underground Houses
Chapter 4: The PSP System
Chapter 5: Design
The Basic Design
Posts
Elevation Changes
Views, Light, Ventilation
Five approved Methods of Design
-Uphill Patio
-Offset Room
-The Royer Foyer
-Clerestories
-Gables
Drainage
Special Designs
Flat-Land Designs
Special Effects
Special Features
Patio Barbecue Area
The Bachelor Bar
Built-in Greenhouses
Root Cellar/Fallout Shelster/Wine Cellar
Built-in Coolers

Chapter 6: Materials: Where to Buy and Scrounge
Wrecking Buildings
Windows
Auctions
Sawmill Lumber
Polyethylene
Concrete
Fee Timber Sources
Working Up Posts and Beams

Chapter 7: Construction
Secret Construction Method
The Excavation
Building the Structure

Chapter 8: You And the Building Codes
Appendices
Download Underground House Book