underground living

[hungry backpacker]

i just finished watching a history channel documentary about how charles manson and his "family" searched the death valley desert for some old underground complex. it was some kind of old mine and there were natural springs here and there that pumped fresh water to the surface all the time. my old off the grid thinking kicked in and i wonder, couldn't someone utilize a place like this? i mean think about it. if someone took the time to map out a fairly large section of it and made sure you could safely get in and out, wouldn't it be an ideal place to live in? you could tap into the freshwater and hunt and trap in the desert. not to mention all kinds of edible critters live underground. you'd be safe from wandering raiders cause nobody wants to wander through the desert. just some thought. anybody ever heard of this area?

edit: found some interesting information on mine exploration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_exploration

[herbalpagan]

one of the hgtv or dyi channels did a show on extreem houses and had several underground houses. One was a cave; they had built a house "front" and cleaned things up, it had an underground spring and they used it as their water supply, and I think as a natural cooling/heating system. I think the house was in Tennessee or Missouri. I hear that the St Louis area has many of those natural caves and during Prohibition, they were used a lot as Speak-easies. I would think that lighting, wires, plumbing would be the major issues as they can't really be hidden as well as in a regular house, but otherwise, I think it would be a great idea. However; ya gotta watch earthquake prone areas and man made caves (mines), I would think.

[BottomsUp]

If you recall, one of the caves Manson liked is now caved in. It would probably be a bad idea to live in a limestone cave.
On the other hand, if you have $450k burning a hole in your pocket: http://www.survivalproperty.com/index.htm

[MJS8725]

I visited this place when I lived in Fresno, CA. It is really cool.

[S.R. Stryker]

I wish I had hundreds of thousands to spend on an underground bunker type house on a measly few acres.

[Oddjob]

1) Buy a used cargo container: ($2,000 - $4000?)
http://www.ehow.com/how_2066175_buy-use ... iners.html
http://www.buyerzone.com/industrial/sto ... iners.html

2) Rent a backhoe

3) Dig a hole

With a little welding, rustproofing, and ingenuity, you could make a very nice home out of a couple of these.

[OhioMe]

The underground home folks tried building under the 'skyscraper living' folks, The results weren't pretty for either group.

[S.R. Stryker]

1) Buy a used cargo container: ($2,000 - $4000?)
http://www.ehow.com/how_2066175_buy-use ... iners.html
http://www.buyerzone.com/industrial/sto ... iners.html

2) Rent a backhoe

3) Dig a hole

With a little welding, rustproofing, and ingenuity, you could make a very nice home out of a couple of these.

Wow. This is the most genius thing I have ever seen. From the looks of it a couple grand or so is a pretty good price for a GINORMOUS steel cargo container. Anyone have any idea how stable a container like this would be with some dirt on top of it ?

[andygates]

You have to factor the weight of the dirt, plus vegetation, all saturated with rainwater then frozen then covered with maximum snow. It's hellacious heavy and I'll betcha that you'd have to reinforce the roof.

[jay_imok]

you say that living underground is cool? watch this:


http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/500328653

THE TUNNEL DWELLERS OF NEW YORK

Chantal Lasbats, Director



might make you rethink things . . . .

[S.R. Stryker]

You have to factor the weight of the dirt, plus vegetation, all saturated with rainwater then frozen then covered with maximum snow. It's hellacious heavy and I'll betcha that you'd have to reinforce the roof.

Maybe you could gain some basic welding skills and reinforce the roof with steel. Now, just doing that gives you a livable area of square footage because your box is already built. This is bad assery at its finest.

[NapTime]

I think the flat top of the cargo container is a real problem here. I spent a while looking into fallout shelters, and the most common ones seem to be large diameter culvert or school buses. Less cubic feet than a container, but they have the built in arch on top for support. I dunno. I'd be wary of just burying things and hoping they don't collapse.

http://www.radshelters4u.com/index3.htm#5
http://ki4u.com/nuclearsurvival/arktwo/ ... otocon.htm
http://cdtactical.com/survival-topics/n ... t-shelters
http://www.green-trust.org/bombshelter.htm
http://www.webpal.org/webpal/d_resource ... usplan.htm

[dkhoward]

Wife and I are in the process of planning this very installation at our ranch. The plan is to bury one, if not two, 40 ft sea/land containers. After much study and considering the way these things are engineered this is what we have found.

Containers are not all the same. Some are built of a type of steel called Contel. Apparently it has a high nickle content that retards rust through.

Containers are engineered such that all the structural strength is on the edges and the corners. THe sides, top and bottom have no real structural strength so they MUST be reinforced before they are buried or they will bow in when backfilled. Our plan is to reinforce the sides with structural square steel tubing, welded to the container frames top and bottom and tack welded to the box side material. THe room will be reinforced with steel square tubing and another layer of steel plate on set to a slight pitch to one side, all seams welded. The cargo doors will be welded shut and a new entrance cut into the top of the container with stairs running down the long side of the container to the interior.

The containers are designed to bear all of the weight of the container and contents on the corners. Our plan is to dig the hole larger than the actual container, pour for footings on the bottom of the hole on which to rest the container. The hole will be backfilled on the bottom with gravel to the top level of the footings (approximately 6 inches in my drawings).

I plan on spray coating a two part epoxy sealer on the entire outside of the container before putting it in the hole. A crane will be used to set the container in the hole and on the footings. THe sides will be back filled with a gravel to facilitate drainage. The top will be covered by about 6 inches of gravel. THe hole thing will eventually be covered by a slab poured for our house on this location.

There will be three perforations in the container itself. One for the door, one for a vent stack, and one for electrical connections.

IF we decide to add a second container they will be set side by side and a doorway cut and then welded between them to double the floorspace.

My calculations show that I can do this entire job for about 1/3 the cost of a conventional basement with a floating floor, perimeter drain system, block walls and a poured roof.

[Festus Hagen]

I think it's fair to assume that they can handle some weight- I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do some work to support dirt all over the roof rather than just weight around the perimeter, as other posters have indicated.

[spchtr]

Brick is reasonably cheap. Barrel vaults are pretty easy to build, and can support a lot of weight. Why not just build something from scratch? You could design it to suit your needs, and even expand it at a later time. Alternatively use the shipping containers as your concrete forms, concrete with rebar reinforcement around the outside of the shipping containers should be sufficient, if done right to support quite massive loads.

There's also those inflatable cement impregnated canvas jobbies. I saw in another thread here. You inflate the package, which is shipped to you on a pallet, then wet the outside and let it harden. You then have a vaulted room, which you could reinforce with rebar and more concrete. Domes are very strong structurally and would work nicely for underground structures. It's actually the weight of the domes that makes them strong, but if the dome is too wide you may have to use tie rods, or possibly buttresses out to the sides to hold it inward. Heck if there's enough limestone and clay and sand in the region you're planning on putting it, you could probably make an underground dome structure out of the local materials. Adobe brick, limestone and sand for concrete or cement. Coat it with pitch to waterproof. Bury it, no problem. I'd work out some kind of drainage too though, probably french drains, basically pits/trenches filled with gravel or sand. heh, you could probably have the drains act as a filter for the water, which would drain into a lower chamber to be used as a cistern. I'd be a little leery of having it drain into one above, unless it was some premade dealy.

[That German Guy]

I think a simple X shape of 2" square steel tubing (1/6-1/8" wall thickness) on the insides of the sides and roof should be more than strong enough to hold back dirt. With tubing on the outside, I'd not settle for tack welds personally, but that's just German overengineering. Another way of using containers is to make a hole about a foot wider than the container in every dimension, and use the container itself as a mold to put concrete (rebar the roof part) around. The concrete is for strength, the container for waterproofing.

As for parking a house on top of a container: My common sense tells me that this is Bad Juju. The container might get pushed up by frost(or the ground could sag around it), either buckling the container or cracking the house's foundation. A house also weighs considerably more than even a 7-stack of 40-footers, at least if it's a proper aka brick house.

as for the barrel vault idea: Some steel tubing and sheeting can be welded on top of a container to do this, and you can use the container roof as a ready-made attic floor. The welding itself should be simple enough, the steel of most containers is 1.5-3mm thick, right in the ideal range for standard TIG welding. You could probably even get by without adding any material at the seams without things falling apart, too.

Oh, and damn you spchtr for posting that concrete form Idea while I was still typing this post. May rabid weasels eat your groin

[JCD]

Wasn't there a thread with a quonset hut covered with dirt which was called a fall out shelter?

[Zmey Smirnoff]

You have to factor the weight of the dirt, plus vegetation, all saturated with rainwater then frozen then covered with maximum snow. It's hellacious heavy and I'll betcha that you'd have to reinforce the roof.

You can stack those containers full of merchandize 8-10 high. I doubt there would be any need to reinforce it if you are going to cover it with couple feet of firt.

[dkhoward]

The containers are designed to bear all the wieght at the corners. The sides and top have no structural integrity. THe floor is designed to hold about 55,000 lbs, give or take. If you have a chance, climb on top of one, get in the middle and jump up and down. That much weight can cause them to bow and sag.

As to putting a slab over a buried container. My engineer assures me that if the slab is properly poured and reinforced (rebar) that the container is in no danger of being crushed. At our latitude, we don't experience enough cold and damp to get frost heave on something buried at least 18 ft deep.

My engineer (Phd mechanical engineer, retired college professor) has recommended exterior bracing of the sides with square tubing welded to the perimieter structural members of the container and then welded to the plate forming the container skin. FOr the roof, he recommends square tubing covered with the same material that is used to underlay concrete floors poured in high rise construction covered with a layer of crushed rock and then sand to form a base on which to pour the slab for the above ground structure.

[Zmey Smirnoff]

Duly noted. But why burry it 18 feet deep? Why not 3-6 feet deep? Can the roof and the floor be reinforced with garden variety lumber and plywood? If the load is distributed on the corners, then some basic 4x4 framing should do the trick?

Just curious. I'm quite ignorant of the subject.

[EeRie]

I once saw a story about a little old lady that buried an airplane fuselage & turned it in to her home. I would guess they are reasonably inexpensive and wouldn't need the reinforcing or quite as much fabrication required for any extended living that say a cargo container would.

[That German Guy]

any cost benefit would be offset by larger transport costs I think.

[Paladin1]

Before any designing I think you need to define the purpose. A temporary shelter can be a cargo container, the plane fuselage or the classic buried giant drainage pipe.

All these can be made to work, but these are short term residences at best. I have always wanted to build a living home that can also serve as a secure shelter. I have plans from here, http://www.formworksbuilding.com/index.html that look ideal.

[Jacob Creutzfeldt]

The containers are designed to bear all the wieght at the corners. The sides and top have no structural integrity. THe floor is designed to hold about 55,000 lbs, give or take. If you have a chance, climb on top of one, get in the middle and jump up and down. That much weight can cause them to bow and sag.

How about putting the container upside down? The "top" corners would be at the bottom and rest on concrete foundations, and the roof would be the original floor which can take quite a load. Just throwing out an idea.

My calculations show that I can do this entire job for about 1/3 the cost of a conventional basement with a floating floor, perimeter drain system, block walls and a poured roof.

And 1/3 of the lifespan of a conventional basement?