if i could?

Could You Imagine?

      Well today I am back to underground houses and touting the benefits of them, as well the possibilities that may be available in design considerations.  The reason I am inserting this pic is that I fell in love with the stairs to the roof of the unit in the right of the picture. A hot summer night and a couple chaise lounges and low lights embedded around the roof edge would set the mood for a rooftop gazing of the stars. A telescope and some piped in music playing some, “Major Tom to Ground Control” by David Bowie, and you have the makings of space travel, with your partner  considering the fact you are on a piece of rock hurtling and spinning through space at 17500 mph. and no one is driving.

     Heck if I didn’t have anyone to share it with, I could get lost up there by myself just enjoying the view. This a dual purpose and as it appears a bedroom below I assume with a walkway to kitchen living room and dining area. I would love to just have the bedroom part sitting over an underground house. The bed would lower from concealment in that high ceiling and adjust to the perfect height. And in the morning if you choose to not make the bed simply push a button and away the bed rises into the loft area where no one can see it.

     This bedroom unit can be factory built also, and delivered by road to your underground house site. Design so the underground spiral stair case comes up into one corner of the bedroom / now slash living room area and you have the perfect utilization of space and able to conform to the 80 per cent mandate of housing below grade, to achieve maximum energy savings yet providing the homeowner with maximum utilization of living space. The perfect combination to alleviate the feeling of being buried as one would get in an underground house. As with any structure and with underground house in particular I would want a minimum of three entrances with no blind alleys in any underground structure. One entrance will never do.

     One entrance is too easy to block with fire and so you would need another and as I said before , I feel 3 would be best as you have little or no windows as an option so you need to have at last another minimum option  to exit in case of fire. It could be an air and light shaft as long as it fitted with a ladder to climb up and out of house in case of an emergency requiring little space and can be covered with a screen or Plexiglas to allow light to pass through and illuminate the area it services.  

     French doors leading out to a downstairs patio walk out would allow you access to the basement area where the kitchen would be handy for cook outs. Bathroom and another bedroom would round out this charming back to nature house that gets you up front and close to nature if landscaped and situated properly. It could easily be built in mass production style and delivered along with the bedroom by truck to the excavated sight. Allowing maximum efficiency and permanent long term usage and renovation as the house and its components will all be designed to last 100 years.

     Many houses now are lasting 100 years so this design requirement would not be out of line and to be expected. The particle board and plastic sided house of today may not be round in 100 years and feel these will have design flaws that will require replacement not long after you pay off mortgage if ever. Siding and other above ground expenses would be eliminated for the most part as you only have one exposed section which is 20 percent of your total square footage.

      I have plans in my head, scary place to keep those things I know, but sometimes it serves me well, anyhow of a light gathering solar tracking device, that by mirrors would reflect light into the underground areas by means of shafts that would extend upward through the earth. Computer tracking of suns path would allow maximum strength of natural light to reflect off mirrors and flood underground portions of house.

      If this house was sitting in the mountains of Colorado, I could easily stop off at my local herb supplier and roll me a fat one and head up to my chaise lounge to watch nature. Back to reality I live in a trailer that is morphed to an old concrete block house, with a round Sears and Roebuck 1940’s era chicken coop on top. May I add it was never used for that purpose as far as I know? One roof I would roll off of and the other I would fall through if I tried to get on them. Reality sucks. But it is what it is. But I can imagine.