An Eco-Friendly Bow Roof Cabin | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

This is pretty awesome. Kind of a smaller scaled house to what we were talking about a few weeks back where they build the structure out of steel and wrapped it in roofing material (www.archedcabins.com).

These seem like they would be great vacation rentals if you wanted to buy a small plot and build a few of these. That or emergency shelters in national parks.

Haha scope creep. I know the feeling. Driving down the highway today I saw a lot of these concrete fences. I'm wondering if you could use them in an a-frame fashion to accomplish the same thing:

I'm also curious how well they would work in lieu of stacking and parging as you did. The outside would still need to be parged but you wouldn't need any interior coat and you wouldn't have to fill them up afterwards.

Alright, haven't found a lot of them so I figured a basic carpenter should be able to build the forms and make his own. I'm trying to minimize the rebar (only really needed for lifting them) and size them so that they use exactly 4 bags of concrete (what I usually come across as do-able for personal mixers). Construction would be similar to what you do with the blocks (run 3 or 4 courses, then pour one bond beam that runs the whole perimeter), but the idea is that it should reduce how much concrete you need. I'd need a structural engineer to sign off or tweak it but that shouldn't be bad. The big question is pricing vs what you put together for your berm. This may be an option:

The only real downside is that you would want your slab poured first so that you could just make a dozen or so at once. I'm also trying to simplify the geometry so that forms are stupid simple. I've got them with a V on top and bottom so that they shed water and nest but I think I may kill that and just have them sit flat. edges are slightly keyed so that the panels can be the same thickness as the vertical beams. That should make the waterproofing of the outside easier.