Yurts and/or tinyhouse movement.

Any structure built of wood will have to be built very, very carefully to avoid the onslaught of termites and rot in this Costa Rican climate. Frankly, I’m skeptical.

That said, friends of ours built a small but interesting one-room bamboo house outside Grecia. They used a Costa Rican builder who specializes in such structures. The framing is all structural grade bamboo. The in-fill in the walls is some combination of mud and cement (as I recall) “plastered” over a bamboo screen. It’s intriguing.

I built my own “tiny house” on some land I bought in the Catskills when I was 20 (27 years ago) and it’s still standing! It was about 400F2 with a large deck and outhouse. I have always been interested in alternative house building and have explored tee-pees and yurts. I think a yurt could work in CR at the right altitude, check out Pacific Yurts for some good info; http://www.yurts.com/

I do wonder about mold and canvas though? I think Scott posted something about earth bag home construction as well, but again with the amount of rain, heat, bugs just not certain this would hold up.

David,

Can you pass on the contact info of the bamboo home builder?

Lotus, I’ve asked our friends who built the bamboo house for contact information. When I know you’ll know.

I looked a Pacific Yurts’ website. The 200s/f yurt (mighty small)costs about $27 per square foot plus whichever of the numerous upgrades you might opt for. That gets you a roof, walls, two windows and a door but nothing else. Delivery would be extra.

You must supply your own site and site improvements, your own platform to put the thing on, and your own interior finishes. By the time you build the platform, make provisions for utilities and septic, and make this thing comfortable, my guess is that you’d have around twice that invested.*

Now I’m skeptical that you can build much of a conventional house anyplace in Costa Rica for $55 per square foot these days, but still it would be worth doing the math. So let’s . . .

Suppose this yurt project saved you (say) twenty percent. That’s a lot . . . until you recall that we’re only talking about (say) a 200s/f structure. At $55 per square foot, that’d be around $11,000 for the finished yurt.

Or you could spend 20% more ($61 per square foot) for a total of $12,200 and get a termite-proof, rot-proof masonry structure that meets the earthquake code and which should last a couple of generations. Sixty-one dollars per square foot is a pretty lowball price, but it could probably be done.

Twelve hundred dollars isn’t much additional to spend for the upgrade to a permanent structure — one that you’re going to be living in, that is — and in the total scheme of things it doesn’t represent much of a savings.

*Many years ago, I investigated a pre-cut geodesic dome (ala R. Buckminster Fuller) from a company in Davison, Michigan. They were incredibly cheap given the area they enclosed, but the prep and the finish work to make such a thing livable brought the cost up to about what a conventional home would have cost at the time. Initial cost doesn’t always tell the tale.

[quote=”sprite”]These things look good for a nomadic experience in a wilderness, but how long would it take your local Tico thief to pull a yurt down and haul away any or all of it?

While the removable contents of any unoccupied building are never completely secure from thieves, couldn’t a trip to the local beach for a week end end up surprising a returning yurt owner with a vacant lot? It’s one thing to lose a TV or lap top to a thief. It’s quite another to lose the very roof over your head.[/quote]

Imagine calling the local police to report your “home” was stolen…lol.

Imagine living in a yurt and how wet everything would get right now, with all the rain we have been having….

I was thinking more in the lines of humidity entering the abode. When we first moved into out present home, some ‘windows’ did not have ‘glass’ only wooden shutters, and when driving back and forth between homes, our ‘furniture’ started to grow ….
[i]That was a very wet season.[/i]

This genre of building technology is catching on in areas where insulation is an issue. If I were building in such an area, ICF construction would be my first choice.

What I’m not clear about is how the Styrofoam will hold up in a tropocal climate, but that’s pure conjecture.

I’d want to know how many of these structures this company has built. My understanding is that there’s a little more to it than just stacking up the forms and pumping them full of concrete.