Category: Retreat Architecture

After a 19 day dry spell, we were hit with one heck of a storm here in southern Pennsylvania last week. I thought I would share with Survivalblog readers the lessons to be learned from this event. The first 29 days of September had been warm and lovely here, with only about 3 inches of the normal 21 inches of rain we should normally see by the end of September. On the last day of September we received the missing 18 inches. With the long period of dry weather preceding the storm, the ground was incapable of absorbing much of …

Dear Jim and Family, I can understand why [the gentleman that writes Laptop and Rifle, a blog recently mentioned in SurvivalBlog] should go forthrightly into the wilderness this way. Its taking control of his life, with his own hands. But it is a pity that some important stuff got overlooked. There’s a wonderful (and necessary) book called the “Uniform Building Code” (UBC) that all contractors know and love as their bible of legal building laws, which also happen to be good engineering. The google programmer is doing the equivalent of writing bad code by ignoring this book. His second hut …

Hello James, I recently stayed with a friend in a little German village northeast of Frankfurt . My friend is restoring his family’s 350+ year old Tudor-style home. I was amazed at the ballistic mass involved. The old walls are 6-8” (15-20cm) thick timber and clay/loam brick, covered in plaster/cement. As part of the restoration, they are adding an additional 6” (15cm) of timber reinforcement on the inside and filling it with 6” of lighter loam bricks for insulation. This results in a total thickness of at least 12” (30 cm) of solid wood and brick. Compare that to our …