Hi Steve,

How exactly does one run electrical and sheetrock on the interior wall of the Liteblok? Do you ship your material out of North Carolina or from Texas, and do you have an estimated freight charge for delivery in Georgia? How many block (or sqft of wall) come on a truck? Is $1.30 ish a sqft a normal turnkey labor install price? The R-value of 35, how is that achieved?

Do you have certified installers or experienced ones in Georgia and/or if done by a diy home owner what kind of support do they get?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

renangle

Donaldson,

I couldn't get your link to work.

Most of us here won’t laugh at the desire for inexpensive housing. That said 50K is a very small budget. I built a house in Connecticut that was about 1100 ft^2 plus the same for the basement. I supplied most of the labor. My total costs were ~ 180K.
 OF that, the engineering costs, well, septic, excavation driveway, drainage and electrical utility were 62K, Figure 120K for the foundation and house. Foundation and basement was 26K with ICF walls and 2” XPS under the slab.
Changing to a slab on grade, fpsf with 4 “ eps insulation under it would have saved about 15000$. I could also have eliminated the Main carrying beam, laly columns, joists, sheathing, underlayment and wood floors for the first floor. Total this saves ~20 K . Now you are down to a 100 K house.
 Eliminating solar airheater, solar DHW saves around 8K changing to a simpler heating system around 3 K, simpler insulation scheme around 3K and smaller layout ~3K
 I think I could build a dirt simple house for around 80K if I had an infill lot with water and sewer.

Where I live I don’t think 50K is possible, but that does not mean it is where you live. Initial questions to ask yourself:
 Do you have city water and sewer or do you need to drill a well and install a leach field?
Next question, how set are you on having a basement? Building slab on grade is a lot cheaper.
 
If I had a super tight budget, I would investigate local lumber mills and see if I could get green framing lumber locally.
 I would probably build a cape with a 20X30 footprint. It would be slab on grade. I would use an acid stain on the concrete floor as the finished floor.
Walls would be 2X6 24” OC, but they would be strapped horizontally on the inside with 2X2 and would be insulated with wet spray cellulose. This gives a ~7” deep wall cavity with minimized thermal bridging. I would use zip sheathing taped on the outside as my air barrier, put 30 lb felt on the outside of that as the drainage plane use green, 1X3 strapping on the outside of that followed by whatever siding I could get cheapest.
 
Floor joists in the second floor would be green lumber, rafters would be 2X12 Rafters and would also be strapped with 2X2 so you have a 13” deep cavity. This would be filled with denspack cellulose. I would shoot for 2 ft overhangs all around.
 After the house is enclosed you will have to let it dry for a good long while before adding insulation or sheetrock. It you are doing the work yourself, you will be taking a while to get to it anyway.
 Floor joists of the second floor 16” OC flooring would be single layer 7/8 AC tongue and groove plywood glued and screwed, sanded filled and painted as the finish floor.
 
All plumbing would be minimized and centralized ie the bathroom and kitchen back up to each other single waste stack, single waste vent. Laundry located in the bathroom Vents for shower, laundry and kitchen stove out the sidewall. Heating: Primary would be a woodstove, secondary would be a propane or natural gas space heater located on the main floor, gas heater vented out the sidewall, woodstove chimney out through the roof with a metal chimney AC would be done later when I could afford it, but I would install the line set and power for a minisplit AC centrally located on the ground floor.

The long wall of the house would face due south. This would make the roof properly oriented to add solar hot water later when you have more money. I would put more windows on the south side. On the second floor, I would use 2 solar light tubes and then a large window at the east and west side walls. These would have awnings to provide summer shading.
 
I would build a second, outside shower for summer use and use an outside gas grill for cooking in the summer as well as a small oven outside. This eliminates a big source of heat gain in the summer.
 I would install quality ceiling fans over the beds and in the living rooms. I would install a very small exhaust only fan on the second floor to provide ventilation.
 I would find a used gas range that did not have a pilot light but that could be manually lit if there was no power.

The reality is everything is expensive. The less stuff you add, the cheaper it is. What you do need to do is make it so the house can be improved later as money gets less tight. As an example, IF you can’t afford ceiling fans right now, at least install the Higher strength electrical boxes to that location and run 3 way wire to the switch location so later you can take out the light fixture and add the fan. While you are at it, run the wiring for multimedia and stereo speakers in the walls. Wire is fairly cheap. Make a careful map of where the wires are so years down the road you can install speakers by just cutting out the drywall and installing them.
 
You are going to have to get good at scrounging stuff. You are going to need 2 36” wide exterior doors and a batch of windows. You will need 2-6 interior doors. Find and buy all these before framing. Have your dad keep his eye out for cabinetry coming out of renovations that you can reuse. Don’t scrimp on the toilet because you only have one and it has to work (toto drake, ada elongated bowl 1.6 gal flush with sanigloss), Shower controls (try Delta or Moen) because these are hard to replace, or change later.
 Put in a small utility room that backs up to the kitchen and bath, accessible through the back of a closet and run as much plumbing and venting through it as possible.

In terms of green stuff, you will have reused appliances, cabinetry, used localy cut green lumber, recycled cellulose insulation, made the house as energy efficient as you can on a very tight budget and heat with biomass. Not bad for low cost green. Good Luck

Eric

Eric.... bravo for one hell of a post. You need to write all the magazines and get your DIY starter green spec home published so you can share your knowledge wth the world.
aj

Yeah I would have to agree with adkjacUpstateNY that was a hell of a post Eric. However I was wondering if anyone noticed this was a 2 year old posting from a person who hasn't been on this site in over a year? All is not lost however, as I actually myself was interested in building a very small home for myself and so this is actually quite a good coincidence.

I have very simple needs. I am a single man who would be up to doing a lot of the work myself and when it comes to things where you have to decide cost over fancy design, I'm choosing cost. Now I also would like to build this as energy efficient as possible, the home I envision is around 700 sq ft and is a single floor slab home with one bathroom and one bedroom and a living room and kitchen. I really like the layout of the michelle kauffman "MKLotus" home she designed. http://www.mkd-arc.com/homes/mklotus/floorplans.php

I was thinking sip panels along with changing the layout of the home so that it could be matched up with the size of whatever "full sized" SIPs run so that nothing or as little as possible had to be cut/custom made so I wouldn't care if the layout changed a little bit in that respect. I'd like to make this a solar passive home and it would be in Iowa so it gets below zero and into the 100's sometimes. I was thinking a split mini ductless system would be enough for the heating and cooling along with the solar passive design, I don't know enough about this to make that call and was wondering if anyone had some thoughts on the issue.

I've worked in excavating and doing concrete poured walls and floors before and I have quite a few friends in various other trades who are familiar with home building so labor isn't really much of an issue other than a few things possibly like plumbing maybe although for such a small house I would think it shouldn't be that difficult to figure out.

So what I want to know is, with the size of this house, using sips for the walls/roof and possibly pouring the slab myself and using a solar passive design w/ the split mini ductless(have a friend who is into HVAC) with a white metal standing seam roof, what neighborhood dollar wise are we talking here? Don't worry about the cost of the land or utilities, it would be grid tied but in the future I would like to install solar and possibly dig a well and do rain water collection and eventually a septic system but that's all in the future. I just want to know what this should run for all the materials and doing most of the labor myself to put up the walls/roof/slab what this should ballpark for. I was thinking when it's done and said in the 20 to 30 thousand dollar range(not with the future plan stuff factored in)

Brian... your guess is as good as mine. To know for sure, start adding up the costs from start to finish. you should be able to do so over a week or so of effort.
aj

Brian,
I totally missed the fact that it was a 2 year old post. Oh well.
 I like simple myself. Personally I would have built a 500 ft^2 house on top of a 1200 ft^2 workshop. Unfortunately local zoning regs prohibit it. So I built a 28X40 basement and a 28X40 main floor. Ranch style.
 
In my case the problem was not figuring out how to live in a small house, but to make the house big enough to meet zoning regs.  I get taxed for 2 bedrooms minimum and I had a lot of space to kill so there was no incentive to make it 1 bedroom.

As far as sips construction goes, I don’t know squat so I can make no comments other then do your homework. The Kauffman house looks cool, I like the layout.
 I would build it with a more conventional sloped roof though. IF you wanted to stay with the modern theme you could do a shed roof ~4/12 pitch facing south.  I could definitely build this out of sticks though.
 Well designed passive solar is awesome. I am a huge proponent in heating climates. You will have a concrete slab so you will have large thermal mass making it effective. I don’t think the overhangs over the windows in the kauffman house are quite right for my climate, but I would need plans to see how I wanted to do it. I also have concerns about building houses with no overhangs because it causes heavier rain exposure on windows and doors and siding. Passive solar requires good windows, ie high solar gain double or triple pane argon or krypton filled low E windows. These are not cheap. As a ballpark you are going to want ~ 100^ft of south facing glass if it is SGHC 0.6 or better.
 
I am not a heating guy, but I don’t think a split ductless heat pump is going to work at 0°F. What would work is augmenting this with a simple space heater that is gas fired (and vented). I saw a study done a few years ago comparing temperature differentials in a house with a central point heat source. It turns out if the house is very well insulated and under 1200 ft^2 you don’t need a distributions system ie ducts. By yourself, leaving doors open in the rooms is fine. The temp distribution is minimal.

You definitely want to do some reading on passive solar design ie bad passive solar design can be worse than no passive solar design.

Too many unknowns for me to ballpark build costs.

Good Luck,
Have fun
Eric