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Make a house cheaper


Guest Plastic

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Guest Plastic

I'm thinking $100-150,000 is about the avergae price you'd pay for a house these days. WHen it boils down to tit ,it doesn't make since why they cost so much. It's just plywood,sheetrock,insulations ,shingles surrounded by brick on the outside. Off course you've got to put the wires and pipes in to. You could build one your self with a couple other people SO why do new ohouses cost so much? The answeris labor.

Labor is why the prices go so high. Not the materials, or the time to design them but them people working on the house. With the low wages they pay the foriegn workers it's suprising that they cost so much. So here's an idea. Instead of buying a house brand new after all the immagrant workers have to get paid their part why not wait a year or the earliest the first buyer wants to move out the home. In Texas houses do depreciate in value and you wouldn't have to pay the cost of labor would you?

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Labor is why the prices go so high. Not the materials, or the time to design them but them people working on the house.

Do you remember how, a just few years ago, new construction could be had for as low as the $80's? Labor wasn't the cost that increased. It was materials, largely the result of Ivan/Katrina/Rita/Wilma and increased transportation costs. As a result, improvements appreciated in value because the replacement cost rose.

This was, of course, a short-term phenomenon.

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Isn't there a house made of beer cans in Houston? Talk About killing two birds with one stone. B)

I took a friend from out of town to see the Beer Can House today. It is a regular 20s bungalow that has been...uhmmm...improved....with beer can siding. Not completely built out of beer cans.

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Guest Plastic

Well we can go to Earth homes. Homes made compeltely out of dirt. They look nice too. They're study, last thousands of years and are resistant to fire,tornados, and earthquakes. DIrt's everywhere so I'm guessing it would be cheap.

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Well we can go to Earth homes. Homes made compeltely out of dirt. They look nice too. They're study, last thousands of years and are resistant to fire,tornados, and earthquakes. DIrt's everywhere so I'm guessing it would be cheap.

Yeah, we could...or I guess more accurately, you could. I'll pass.

Another style that seems to be catching on is stacking up a bunch of hay bails, spraying them with a thick layer of gunite, and letting them rot from the inside, leaving a hollow cavity for the home. An artist is planning on doing this somewhere in the 3rd Ward. I don't know whether she's started yet or not.

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Well we can go to Earth homes. Homes made compeltely out of dirt. They look nice too. They're study, last thousands of years and are resistant to fire,tornados, and earthquakes. DIrt's everywhere so I'm guessing it would be cheap.

But not rain, vermin, insects, etc. Plus, in Houston (and even worse in other areas) the water table is so high, your home would be more of a pool.

In the Rockies, there are bulders that buil dmore environmental homes in the ground, to utilize thermal energy. But they also have elevation change to allow for things like an entrance at ground level.

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Well we can go to Earth homes. Homes made compeltely out of dirt. They look nice too. They're study, last thousands of years and are resistant to fire,tornados, and earthquakes. DIrt's everywhere so I'm guessing it would be cheap.

Somehow i don't see the earth mound surviving a Earthquake.

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Material prices have gone up tremendously too. concrete, copper, wood have all going up quite a bit.

Copper wires are being stolen because of this. I had a friends whose new home while being built was stripped of all it's new wires.

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