The $50 & Up Underground House Book

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$50 and Up Underground House Book
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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.

The $50 & Up Underground House Book is the only book to explain in detail author Mike Oehler’s revolutionary Post/Shoring/Polyethylene building method, which cuts building materials to the absolute minimum. (See the video/DVD section for an illustration comparing P/S/P with the materials used in normal frame house construction.)

But The $50 & Up Underground House Book does much more than just cut your building material costs by up to 90%. It is widely recognized as the book which offers the reader the greatest possibilities for light, air 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.

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.

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


Table of Contents
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

This is an abridged table of contents. There’s more in the book. It’s simply the No. 1 information source for anyone wanting to build low-cost underground homes, offices or shelters.

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."

Only $19.95
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Mole Publishing Co. PO Box 6003 Missoula, MT 59806 406-493-9540