We Don’t Like Our Underground House | Hacker News Reader

We Don’t Like Our Underground House

dengarden.com

473 pointsNoRagrets311 comments

> tried to fix it ourselves by ejecting costly liquid epoxy into the holes and cracks from inside the house

Waterproofing has to go on the outside surface to work.

> Any wood on the house was a magnet for termites, and they were happily gnawing away all the woodwork that touched the ground and the concrete. We replaced all damaged wood with treated timber and soaked it in creosote for good measure.

Never have wood in contact with concrete. For one thing, concrete is a sponge for water, and it will wick into the wood. For another, it becomes a highway for hidden termite infestations, as you've experienced. The solution on my house was to put a stainless steel sill plate between the wood and the concrete.

The house has an underground basement, and it's dry (20 years now). I had a wet basement before, and did everything I could think of to keep it dry:

1. gravel under the slab with plastic on top sloping down to a gravity drain. The slap is on top of the plastic.

2. gravity drain, no pumps

3. The exterior concrete walls have a layer of waterproofing, followed by a "drain mat", followed by a foot of gravel wrapped in drain fabric. French gravity drains all around.

4. deep eaves on the roof keep the water away from the ground adjacent to the house.

5. ground slopes away from the house. Driveway slopes away. Deck slopes away.

There are cracks in the walls and floor, but no water. Gotta think of defense in depth, like a castle, with layers of defense. If water pools against the house, it will get in, guaranteed. The design has to prevent any pools from forming.

> Humidity in an underground house needs to stay at no more than 50%, but I get nosebleeds at that level

I got regular nosebleeds from the dry air in Arizona after moving there. Went away after 6 or 9 months.

In very wet climates, such as those in parts of Scandinavia, the tradition is to dig a thin trench all along the concrete basement walls/foundations and put a sheet of reinforced plastic along the outside of the wall. Then fill in outside this sheet with gravel, which doesn't hold moisture in the same way that dirt does.

The property still needs to face downhill, to allow gravity to drain away the water so it doesn't sneak in and get stuck against the walls, but this is a nice passive system to greatly reduce the humidity in basements. I don't think it would work well for a basement built in marshland, then you'd probably need pumps or active air circulation.

This is basically what you described in your point 3, just pointing out here that this technique works well even in climates that have 200 days of rain per year. Admittedly the temperature figures into it; it probably wouldn't work with both 200 days of rain and average temperatures of 25 celcius.

This is common construction in Germany as well, with a drainage pipe near the bottom of the gravel all around the house, which provides a low-restriction path for water to escape.

I would add, having helped with some houses relatives were building, that usually a fabric filter is put in as well, usually multiple layers, so that dirt has no chance of sneaking into the gravel. The cellars also have accessible pipes that can let water leave the cellar easily (installed at the lowest point of the cellar, so the floor is slightly tilted, as well as a replacable one-way valve to keep water from coming in the same way (IIRC it's weight activated, it only drains if more than about a liter of water is inside the pipe wanting to go out.

Funny, I have heard them called French Drains

I think that's the English word for that, yes. In Germany we normally call it "Drainage" which is also a French word. Don't know what we Germans got with France and trenches... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II...

</satire> ;-)

"French" actually refers to the (American) popularizer, Henry French.

Generically, it's usually "weeping tile".

From the surname of the implementor.

Here is a YouTube of a drainage system in the US. But a lot of older houses and mass manufacturered houses probably don't have them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keghWP_sVzg

Our house has a full cellar with the above solution done 20 years ago. Not a spec of humidity in there. Here's a concept sketch:

https://isodran.se/uploads/6d9bc8cf5f18260f6fa65d828eeb69b8....

What kind of dirt is your soil?

Does the soil not infiltrate into the gravel over time, clogging it? Or does the water still flow better than through unmodified soil after this happens?

The solution is to wrap the gravel with filter fabric, which will prevent it from being clogged over time.

wouldn't the filter fabric get clogged over time?

I would guess that a clogged membrane is more of a barrier to water flowing into the gravel than flowing out, as reverse-flushing is often a (partially-)effective measure to restore the flow in a clogged filter.

Also, I get the impression there’s an inherent lifetime to these things. If it works for 50 years, you’d consider yourself happy with the result.

It’s like changing your roof; it lasts long enough that you can consider it maintenance-free and only just be wrong (it’ll be a nasty surprise if you buy a very old home without considering when it was done last).

Usually, what will happen is that someone builds an indoors living space in a cellar where this is sub-par and there’s only been chilly storage rooms before, and then get mold in the plaster walls after a few years. The next owner discovers the problem and gets the resulting bill and lawsuit.

The few people knowledgable enough will avoid these houses, while those who don’t are happy that they seem surprisingly cheap.

I've helped with construction of some houses with gravel+filter bedding. There is usually more than one layer of fabric+gravel. It also helps keep the gravel around. The estimated lifetime of the filters I helped putting in is around 150 years. It's a fairly standard way to bed a house in germany outside the cities.

Nice. That’s interesting to know. 150 years is as close to permanent as I’d expect of most things that are expected to do something.

I wonder what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about the buildings they were building? Did they think that if it was still standing in 150 years they'd be happy? Would they be surprised the buildings were still standing 1000s of years later, or was that what they were hoping for at the outset?

The thing is, back then statics and architectural design were in their children shoes still. So if your roof was 3 tons, your supports had to hold up 300 tons because you had no better way. Nowadays, it holds 15 tons for 3 tons + 12 tons snow, for example, or in more äquatorial areas, it's 3 tons + 1 ton rain water.

It's not hard to make things last when you helplessly overspec because you have no idea how close you are to collapsing and the material quality is extremely unreliable.

My home was built in 1908. So, in that regard, I should expect another few decades.

Same technique with building a retaining wall in a yard. Dig about 1 foot (30cm) along the wall, plastic sheet liner, fill with gravel. Then add a few inches of soil on top for grass, etc.

This prevents the wall from slowly leaning away from the side with earth on it, pushing it. Especially important in climates that freeze. The gravel provides extra space for ice to expand into.

this technique is the same in the US. unfortunately this article is the epitome of someone building a house with no idea of how to build a house.

They didn't build it, they bought it 6 years old. But apparently they overlooked warning signs too at the time. It already had cracks and leaks, and was being sold $45K below construction price.

If it looks too good to be true...

This is done even in Israel, a middle eastern country with not too much rain. They usually use some kind of flexible cement on the walls instead for plastic sheets though.

If you do that while building the cost is not significant, you don't need significant digging and the materials are not expensive.

How tall are the basements?

2.5 - 3 meters from the inside, I guess 0.5 - 1 meters more in total.

In wet/cold climates like in Nordics you also have to consider where the dew point will be inside the structures.

Even if water does not get in, the temperature difference between inside and outside can create dew point that resides somewhere inside the wall, ceiling or floor. Then you have water from the air condensing inside the structures and ruining the house.

In the Midwest where it’s flat, you build this way and then install a sump pump at one edge to lift the water up and transport it down “slope” (which may be a 1% grade) I’m pretty sure in some of these houses the pump sees the same water multiple times.

Waterproofing on concrete walls is not recommended imo. (even if popular now in the States), as it will prevent the concrete walls to evaporate the moisture. This was popular in the 80s I believe in some Nordic countries, but not allowed/used anymore. You can/should install a dimpled foundation membrane though.

The idea was applying the waterproofing only one one side, so the water can evaporate from the other (inside) side. The inside should not, of course, be covered with something impermeable like plastic sheeting or foam insulation.

The "dimpled foundation membrane" is the "drain mat".

> Waterproofing has to go on the outside surface to work.

Of course, there is the minor issue that outside work on an underground dome is... probably not very easy and uniquely terrible for the "lawn".

Obviously, you are 100% correct, but that's little consolation to anyone in this situation. If anything, the dilemma highlights the incompatibility of this type of building with American-style home ownership.

To be fair, I have seen a couple of really thought out underground homes, and this one is kind of nuts.

They (the builders) have a hill face on the back to serve as a “periscope” but they dig a giant funnel on the other side.

I mean at this point I wonder if the architect is still around. He should be wearing this project like an albatross around his neck.

If there was an architect.

I don’t plan on buying any quirky houses in the future, aside from some amenities, but I think it’s safe to say that if you’re buying a weird house your first question should be about the building permits and such. If it is an under the table job, just run as fast as you can. And maybe for the good of humanity, anonymously report them.

> Waterproofing has to go on the outside surface to work.

He was fixing cracks, which is effectively waterproofing, and it did work, locally, as he mentioned the water was "rerouted".

It works like this:

- Injection ports are adhered and spaced along the crack.

- Epoxy is smeared along the crack from the inside, providing a temporary seal for the next step.

- Epoxy or polyurethane is injected into the ports, starting from the bottom and progressing upwards as material seeps out of the ports above

This works, but this guy just didn't take it far enough, probably for good reason.

I’ve had good luck with a concrete product called Xypex for waterproofing cracks (in my case between a foundation and bedrock). It’s is much more within the scope of a DIY project so maybe something to try first.

As others have pointed out, you need a water mgmt plan. You can't seal these kinds of problems away permanantly. The seal will last for a couple years until the water/moisture in contact will find a way through during temp cycling, or any other insignificant movement.

The sealant should be the last line of defense after channeling the water away, and keeping anything that can wick moisture away from the sealed surface.

I had a wet basement problem and I got some excellent advice from a very knowledgeable home inspector on how to fix it. He said I had to re-grade the land around the entire house so that water would drain away from the foundation, and that it should be a shallow slope (no more than 1-in-12) and go out for at least ten feet. One dump truck's worth of fill dirt later, a month of manual labor, and a large bag of grass seed, and the problem was solved, and hasn't recurred for 8 years so far.

I had contractors quoting me tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the entire basement to install French drains, put in more sump pumps, seal the concrete walls, and re-drywall everything afterwards, but all of that would've just been expensive band-aids over the real problem, which was that water was falling on the lawn and flowing towards the house instead of away from it. Fortunately I already had good gutters that drained to the street, but if I hadn't, the home inspector definitely would have recommended that too.

I have more money now so if I were to do it again I'd just hire a guy with a bobcat to do the grading instead of doing it all by hand with a wheelbarrow, shovel, and hand tamper. With the right tools it would only take half a day (and cost $1k or less).

> I had contractors quoting me tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the entire basement to install French drains

That's criminal! Before I bought my first house, my realtor would show me how some of the houses we looked at either already had, or would have foundation/basement issues due to land grading and warned me to always make sure the ground slopes away from the house. And that was free advice from a guy who just wanted to sell me a house and get his commission!

These guys clearly knew better but just wanted to get more work.

For the benefit of others reading this: water management techniques are site specific and the optimum strategy will depend on how water is approaching a building.

Grading the ground to slope away from a house will work wonders if your problem is surface water, but different techniques will be required if your problem is ground water or roof run-off. Further, the degree of water protection required will depend heavily on both climate conditions and soil type. If you have fast-draining soil (e.g. sand) drainage will take care of itself regardless of how much rain you get. If you have non-draining soil (e.g. clay) you will need to go to a lot more trouble to keep water out even if it doesn't rain too much.

Further, most of the techniques people are discussing in this thread--surface grading, french drains, exterior foundation waterproofing, roof rainwater diversion--are building code requirements in most areas. Any house built in at least the last 20 years, by competent contractors and in a jurisdiction with adequate code enforcement, should have all of these features built in.

Older properties may, or may not, have water management features. Whether this is a problem will depend on local soil conditions and climate. If in doubt, consult a qualified engineer.

> Any house built in at least the last 20 years, by competent contractors and in a jurisdiction with adequate code enforcement, should have all of these features built in.

For those not in the construction business, this sentance needs the following addition ", but you need to check." Relying on code inspection and competent builders is like relying on software to follow RFC must and should. They should do it, but there's a significant chance they didn't and it's going to be your problem if they didn't, so you should confirm before you buy. You also can't rely on home inspectors to find this kind of thing; again, they should.

My general experience dealing with contractors in a large city with a decent permitting system demonstrates that you have to basically force the contractor to comply - they won’t even do a permit unless you mention it first and some will even actively go out of their way to try to convince you not to get one. Not every contractor I’ve worked with is like this but more often than not it is the case.

Permits are often time-consuming to get and can be expensive. If you go shopping on price, you will likely find contractors who believe the best thing they can do for you is to avoid the time and expense. After all "I'm going to build it to code anyway."

Having done a lot of work on two houses now, I don't shop on price, and my contractor always gets permits and does inspections.

What is the best way to self educate on these topics?

I know I could buy and comprehend some used college text books. I am also interested in other related topics related to home / building construction and maintenance.

What related topic(s) do you recommend? Any suggestions on how to approach formally learning these things from trusted sources?

Anything by Joseph Lstiburek[0] will give you a good insight into best practices from an engineering and research perspective. He has a lot of stuff on his website[1] but it's it's not very discoverable. Look under the guidance tab but be prepared to hunt around.

If you're interested in the legal requirements for construction--which, unfortunately, are not necessarily the same as currently understood best practices--buy the relevant building code documentation for your jurisdiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lstiburek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rem5WhFiiwU

[1] https://www.buildingscience.com/

Thanks.

Along those lines how would one do some formal education on wanting to build (and maintain) their own house? I want to understand what my options are, what my limitations are (non-building code related), what the trade offs are (materials, techniques, site requirements). I want to self educate not only for the initial design and site selection but also so I have enough knowledge to work with contractors and understand the suggestions they are making.

This is all new to me (apartment dweller) but it's coming soon and I'm not sure how to approach it in an efficient and formal way.

I don't think there's a single educational track that addresses everything you want to know.

An architecture degree would give you the background to address most things related to construction, but that's a 2-6 year commitment and is overkill if you just want to build your own house.

I'm not aware of any formal tracks that address household maintenance. Most of this tends to be learned through a combination of reading permanent appliance manuals (e.g. if the manual for your water heater says 'do X every six months,' you do X every six months.) and googling how to fix stuff when it breaks.

There's not a lot of non-obvious maintenance needed on the structure of a house. If stuff looks broken, you just look up how to fix it, or hire someone to fix it for you. There's not really much of an equivalent to car oil changes where something non-obvious has to be done regularly or the building turns to scrap.

For electrics - Rex Cauldwell's "Wiring a House" is written in an accessible manner that shouldn't send you to Google too often. A copy of the NEC helps if you want to really understand everything (or being willing to dig through contractor forums to understand oddball situations) but is overkill for most. The book is mostly about thinking about how to wire a house than prescriptive "this is how it must be done."

I've worked with lots of electricians over the years and the majority of the things in that book reflect the best practices I've seen. Things that don't go out of style like making choices that are respectful of the next person who will work on something. The thing that does go out of style is the NEC it is based on as the latest edition is from 2014 so some specifics may start to be incorrect but by and large it is still applicable.

There's a lot of good info free at https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/ . It's a Taunton site (Fine Woodworking, etc.) and they'd like you to buy a Prime subscription but there's many knowledgeable builders and building science people who really know their stuff. There's much good advice in the Q&A.

The Build Show on YouTube is pretty good. Matt Risinger builds a lot of high end homes and puts a lot of attention to details in the construction that the mass manufactured homes don't have.

https://www.youtube.com/c/MattRisinger/videos

All good points. I'll add that the company that wanted to charge me tens of thousands to put in all those features were saying it was a groundwater issue because they wanted to make money, but they were lying to me. They were essentially salespeople, and they didn't get paid unless they did work. The home inspector, meanwhile, who I paid and who wasn't beholden to any construction interests, gave me the correct diagnosis. There's an important lesson here that's especially apt for construction; always get independent advice. The few hundred it'll cost you is absolutely worth it because the typical cost of construction is so much more.

As for code compliance -- like pretty much all houses in the area, it was built in the 1950s, so it didn't have any of that stuff per code. It had been substantially renovated recently by people who clearly were not following code and/or the permitting process and who fucked all sorts of things up (including the grading of the foundation; they had actually made it worse while doing unrelated landscaping). I also had some "fun" issues with unpermitted electrical work. If I had to guess I'd say that it could be over half of all work that isn't done correctly. So definitely don't trust it. Have someone who reports only to you looking over everything (if you don't have the knowledge yourself).

I usually get at least 3 quotes. A detailed quote is a good sign they know what they are doing. An open ended quote is a good sign they dont. This does not work 100% of the time. But a good diagnosis goes a long way. Someone I know wanted a bit of electrical and sheetrock work done in their house. The dude gave her a piece of paper with 1 number on it, how much. No detail/swag of material, no detail/swag of hours, nothing, just a price. What is interesting is I (and this is just luck) I seem to always get one awful, one medium, and one good. Just kind of worked out that way. The nice thing is once you find a decent contractor they can recommend others or do the work themselves. But finding a decent one can be a pain.

Getting quotes will help you if you already knew exactly what work you needed performed, but if I had talked to 3 water infiltration mitigation companies I would have just ended up with 3 quotes in the tens of thousands of dollar range. None of them did landscaping, which was what I actually needed. So I wouldn't rely on quotes when there's any ambiguity in the problem. I would rely on quotes if e.g. I needed to replace my entire roof, or replace all my windows. Those at least are narrowly scoped.

"I also had some "fun" issues with unpermitted electrical work."

Ca. 2004, we bought a house in a new-ish subdivision of Cedar Park, north of Austin. Built in the mid '90s, it wasn't extremely high-end, but it also wasn't the lower end with the failing drywall joints that were very common. Later, I was replacing a light fixture in a bathroom and discovered that none of the fixtures had electrical boxes behind them---the fixture was attached to the drywall with Romex just going off into the wall.

My current house was built in the 1950s and subsequently remodeled and added-onto at least twice. The custom oak kitchen cabinets by a previous owner are pretty nice. The custom wiring and plumbing less so. Back when I was trying to use ethernet-over-power, I had a fun game of, "Will this outlet get signal?" We had a plumber install a new kitchen faucet and he had to re-do the drain and supply lines in the cabinet---he took the "Device", the prior drain piping, back to the shop to show the rest of the guys.

Incompetent electrical work can be "fun." I've encountered:

Permanent lighting fixtures wired up using lamp cord.

A light switch mounted directly to drywall without an electrical box.

14 fixtures, including receptacles, on a single circuit with a wire length of >100 feet.

A 40 amp continuous load connected using wire rated for 32 amps in continuous duty.

A 60 amp breaker "protecting" a wire rated for 30 amps.

Indoor-only, dry-location, cable used outdoors where exposed to weather.

Indoor-only, dry-location, cable buried underground.

Receptacles connected using 10 AWG wire despite the fact that the connecting screws are only capable of securely connecting 12 and 14 AWG wires.

Building ground consisting of a copper wire buried in a deep hole instead of connected to a ground rod.

Neutral wires from four 15A circuits connected to a single 14 AWG pigtail in the service panel.

Multi-wire branch circuits wired with both hot wires connected to the same leg at the service panel. Illegal, and very dangerous, as heavy loads can overload the neutral wire to twice its rating without tripping any breakers.

Worst of all, the most dangerous work was done by allegedly qualified electricians who were trained to know better.

My house was destroyed by Hurricane Irma and I had to gut the interior. I found an area where, I am assuming the previous owner repaired as I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine a licenced electrician would do it, anyway the area, was an area where the romex did not reach the other side of the romex, so the person took speaker wire twisted them together, to be about the size of the romex wire and linked the two stands of romex They did not strip the plastic shielding from each strand of wire, just joined them at the ends. So I had 120 running thru basically a single strand of speaker wire.

This is a great observation about the home inspector being more likely to give you an impartial diagnosis. There's an old guy who's a semi-retired home inspector down the block from me and it makes me think I should hire him for consultation when thinking about big projects.

Definitely do it. I got easily 20X the value out of my home inspector than what I paid him. Not just here on the drainage problem but on other stuff as well. I paid him $800 in total to inspect two homes, he gave me detailed reports for each one plus all sorts of useful insights during the several hours each inspection took, and then he answered a bunch of questions via email for free after I ended up closing on the second house and discovering the various problems with it. And for consultation on just a single issue I'd expect you'd pay a bit less than $400.

I neglected to mention that all the roof water was collected into pipes that went downhill into the storm drains. Having it dump out next to the house is asking for trouble.

Pains me to read this since I know that this is 100% the solution for my basement problem, but due to my site context, it's impossible for me to adopt this solution. My ancient house sits pretty much directly on the lot line next to the paved lane. The house is slightly below the grade of the lane and some runoff is bound to just go directly into the house. Of course I have basement water problems!

The true solution of doing what you've said is not possible unless I managed to convince the city to regrade their lane. Unlikely!

> convince

Sounds like a job for a lawyer. Not that it will be cheap, but I’d guess neither is water damage?

They have in-ground ‘drains’ that you can pipe to another area of the property or to a basin w a pump to remove the water.

Also, for inside the basement, you can have a bit of the floor removed at the edge and have a drain channel that empties into a sump pump.

The strange thing is that I live is a place where it rains 9 months out of the year and my 40 year old house violates many of these. No waterproofing or French drain around the outside (over the 15+ years we have been in the house I have dug down pretty deep along the foundation in various places working on projects). The bottom floor is four feet under soil level. We are at the bottom of a hill and all the water above us drains around and past the house (if you stand in the back yard after a major rain storm you can actually hear the water flowing). The driveway slopes towards the house (the very bottom slopes up a tiny bit in front of the garage where it flows into a sump pump next to the garage door). The ground doesn’t slope away from the house. The front yard is feet higher than the backyard. It’s all sloping past the house. The eaves are narrow. Honestly, I’ve wondered many times why we don’t have water problems, but we’ve never had a one.

Hey, you just described my house, sump pump and all. Good luck! I have a ton of water issues.

What water issues have you had?

foundation slab is sunken and cracked by various amounts, rotten sill, bugs. This was all before my time. From old pictures it looks like the property was re-graded at some point.

Are you in Seattle? I’ve heard it said Seattle doesn’t have an architectural style, and what if has isn’t suited for the environment. It’s all imported ideas.

We passed on a house because a solid floor deck with a plugged drain had dumped water into the house, right next to a lintel. Not dealing with that.

I don’t understand how the houses with no soffits (not tiny soffits. Zero soffits) haven’t rotted out ages ago.

French drains are not permanent! My dad had to replace one that was going on 20, and the guy who replaced it told him not to count on more than 10 years. There was a sump involved, which might shorten the life, but they are a temporary solution.

> Never have wood in contact with concrete.

If you have wood above concrete this can be hard to avoid entirely, and outdoors even a metal bracket can collect water.

Wood is not a sponge. It’s a directional sponge. Water wicks from the end much faster (farther) than the sides. Some of the best deck designs carry the cross beams directly on the supports, which means no end grain sits where water can collect. The wooden sill on a concrete foundation you can’t usually avoid, but the fact that the wood is lengthwise is, I suspect, the only reason we get away with it. It provides a little protection, but I think code most places may be pressure treated lumber for that as well, since a 50+ year house can still end up needing the sills replaced otherwise.

Never let dirt touch your siding, and never slope your landscaping toward the house.

Termites really love wet wood.

That's why building code requires pressure treated wood at any place it's to come in contact with the ground of concrete in most (all?) places pressure treated (if I'm remembering my high-school drafting class correctly).

That's why concrete piers you can buy generally have a pressure treated wood cap they come with, and why the posts used on top of them under a house to hold the floor joists are also generally pressure treated.

Code here doesn't require pressure treated wood, but instead asphalt felt is added between the concrete and the wood, which prevents water from travelling to the wood.

For new construction it is common to use sill gaskets that go between sill plates and concrete foundations. This provides additional protection of sill plates from moisture.

I wonder how much this has to do with decreased building porosity. Used to be if you got water in some places it would just evaporate into the airflow. Anywhere there is no airflow, the water will persist.

Right. Modern construction standards, aiming to reduce energy usage, make it much easier to get serious water damage, and so necessitate spending more effort towards waterproofing.

Here's a good video illustrating what you're talking about: https://youtu.be/KBMMDY3LFAA?t=204 . If you had a leaky window like that with a house built today, you'd get mold and rot in no time.

> If water pools against the house, it will get in, guaranteed. The design has to prevent any pools from forming.

I still have a somewhat wet basement which has a field stone foundation. But I used to have really bad problems because water would come down off a hill and run down my gravel driveway and eventually pour into my basement.

Tried various things including drainage work around the house but it pretty much just silted up with sandy soil. The thing that ultimately mostly fixed the problem is a neighbor in heavy construction put some 12" drainage pipes under my driveway to divert runoff to a big open field that doesn't flow down to my house.

I still get some water with heavy rain and saturated ground but it's manageable now.

Standing water can do extra damage in a cold snap. And at a time few would want to go outside and fix it. It’s one of the problems, for instance, with shallow roofs. Snow on the shingles melts, forms a dam, the water gets under the shingles. If it doesn’t get into the roof at this point, then night comes and it refreezes, slowly destroying the envelope until it does.

> concrete is a sponge for water

If you are mixing it yourself, the waterproofing stuff (SikaLatex here in France) will avoid this, make it easier to work with and stronger after it cures.

The American indifference to architecture has a flip side: build an innovative building and you'll have innovative problems.

The authors of "Learning from Las Vegas" once got a contract to design a fancy repair shed for trains in Pittsburg. They picked one out of a catalog and got the remark "If we wanted this, we should have hired an architect." The architects thought that the application deserved a roof that didn't leak, but didn't deserve a custom design.

The authors of "Domebook" and "Domebook 2"

https://www.worldcat.org/title/domebook-one/oclc/36821926

deliberately took them out of print because they learned the hard way you don't want to live in a geodesic dome. (e.g. for one thing you'll never be able to hang a painting)

I know one alternative housing entrepreneur who has left a string of barely livable buildings in his wake. I know another who had more success because he kept building variations on a theme (A-Frame houses with Japanese-looking details) but even there when somebody lives in them for a year they realize that a square foot of space in a rectangular building is worth a square foot, a square foot in some other building is worth less.

I’m confused about the train shed example. What are you trying to say there?

Innovative architecture does not equal problems, it is commonly done all over the world. It’s a matter of good design principles, materials science and factoring the human experience in architecture, which all good architects care for. Maybe the problem comes from people trying to make it on the cheap and cutting corners?

Maybe in Germany an architect can make a flawed building and get away with it, but in America the buyer or resident will have recourse to the courts and will take advantage to the maximum possible.

In the case of that train shed, the innovative design is not going to improve the business results, and almost any desire to have a unique image can be pursued at low cost by putting a sign on or around the shed. If you want to keep that image fresh you can replace the sign at 0.01% the cost of replacing the building.

The motivation of making a building that impresses other people is dangerous -- the Ancien Regime in France was motivated a lot by that but they found that that "track" leads to losing your head.

Ironically, the shed was commissioned by people involved with the notorious Mellon family which did an astonishing amount of damage to the U.S. Economy and Political system circa 1975-2000. For one thing they refused to upgrade US steel production to use the basic oxygen furnace as Germany and Japan were doing -- and they used protectionism to keep their expensive low-quality steal going into U.S. products such as automobiles. Thus they harmed the competitiveness of US industry.

After protectionism was discredented, the Mellons then went on to pay this guy

https://www.amazon.com/Blinded-Right-Ex-Conservative-David-B...

to promote fake scandals around Bill Clinton and ultimately maneuver him to get impeached.

If somebody got them to listen for once and abandon one vainglorious scheme that would have been remarkable -- because it is just so hard to get people like that to listen! Heck, had somebody showed Louis 14 or 16 some tough love we might be watching "Keeping up with the Louises" on reality TV!

> Maybe in Germany an architect can make a flawed building and get away with it

That is quite unnecessary attack. The comment you are responding to was literally about those buildings NOT being flawed. The suggestion was that usage of design principles and materials and following the regulations lead to non-flawed innovative buildings.

Also, Germany actually has pretty good legal system, there is no reason to imply they can be innovative only because law system does not work.

> The motivation of making a building that impresses other people is dangerous -- the Ancien Regime in France was motivated a lot by that but they found that that "track" leads to losing your head.

The French revolution did not happened because of architecture nor because of trying to impress other people. Really, there were way more important causes.

> Maybe in Germany an architect can make a flawed building and get away with it, but in America the buyer or resident will have recourse to the courts and will take advantage to the maximum possible.

The article that we are commenting on here is about a property in the US where they had absolutely no legal recourse, either to the seller or the builder/architect. The timescales are too long with houses for there to be any guarantee of there being a business to be held liable.

Not only that, in most of western Europe you get 5, 10 or more years builder guarantee, regulations are very strict, insurance is extremely cheap, full coverage and no-questions-asked.

The majority of houses are concrete or masonry and not oversized wooden crates.

I don’t even know how Germany came into the picture, but that attitude explains a lot of the boring “box with a sign on it” architecture.

in America the buyer or resident will have recourse to the courts and will take advantage to the maximum possible.

The courts are only a good remedy for the wealthy or if there's a lot of money at stake -- they said they bought the house for $105,000. Successfully suing the builder and/or seller could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Not many people can pay $30,000 in legal fees for a "possible" payout that might only be a portion of the price paid.

The architect will blame the contractor.

Keeping up with the Quatorzes has a better ring to it. Keeping up with the Bourbons would make more sense. But, why shoe-horn your politics into this?

> Innovative architecture does not equal problems, it is commonly done all over the world.

I believe PaulHoule's point was not that innovative architecture will always be problematic. But, rather, that all buildings will encounter some problems, and those problems will require regular maintenance and solutions. If you have a "normal" house, then those maintenance and solutions are common and there are plenty of people out the in the world that you can hire to fix it. If you have a unique (or rare) kind of building, less people know how to help you.

I am also confused about the train shed example, though. I'm curious to hear a clarification on that point.

True about maintenance.

Read this book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas

for the story about the Train shed; that book reveals the inner logic of contemporary vernacular architecture just as Jane Jacobs did for the prewar period.

Also there is a "local knowledge" that rules supreme over indigenous people and other people -- in the US South people have awful problems with insects so you cannot necessarily translate experience in Pennsylvania there.

Finally there is a "safety in numbers" in that a standardized house is a easily traded commodity. There is a system of finance, insurance, law, construction and other practices that make it likely if not certain that you can sell a conventional house for at least what you paid for it in a timely fashion.

I think maybe the quoted response should be ""If we wanted this, we WOULDN'T have hired an architect." That clarifies the meaning at least.

Thank you. That makes it make sense.

Where is your evidence for "American indifference to architecture"? Frank Lloyd Wright and some of the greatest architects in the modern era would like a word with you. Not only is America the home for much of the avant garde in art, but our wealthy populace and cities have powered all kinds of movements that wouldn't have gotten off the ground in other countries with much more restrictive rules about architectural style.

Ha! FLW certainly would did not have many flattering things to say about the attitudes of America at large towards architecture.

Only ~10% of all homes in the US were designed by architects, and it shows.

Confess your unpopular opinion: Frank Lloyd Wright is terrible.

Fallingwater was unsound from the day it was built, and despite extra-reinforcing by the contractor when built, the cantilevered balconies needed to be fixed multiple times to ensure the safety of the building.

New York's Guggenheim has a design that looks good on paper and in isolation, but in person looks shoddy, as the smooth concrete seams are not quite so smooth as in the design drawings. Additionally, Fifth Avenue in the 80's & 90's on the Upper East Side has many absolutely gorgeous Gilded Age mansions, museums and churches, which fit well with one another, while the spiral of the Guggenheim thumbs its nose and screams "Look at me!" like an obnoxious teenager.

I'll see myself out.

And overwhelmingly his buildings were known to leak and have various other problems that generally made them inhabitable.

So, while they look nice, they are the very essence of form over function. In my book a device (building) that fails in its primary purpose (to provide shelter) is a failure despite how nice it might look.

Everyday in NA construction companies build underground/below grade without any issues. These folks didn't know what they were doing and afterwards didn't do what they needed to to fix it. Maybe they just didn't have the resources.

I would have never buried concrete without proper waterproofing. A possible fix (least expensive) would have been digging up and uncovering the house to apply a closed cell roofing foam (3 lb Foam). It would have not only insulated their entire house but would have waterproofed it and prevented many of the rodents and bugs from entering. They should have had proper drainage also.

Looks like the franchise they hired to build their house didn't know what they were doing or was more a fly by night operation.

They weren't the original builders, with the realtor and seller first directly mentioned under point 1 and again later on. This does seem to be something folks miss, given the other comments under the article.

That said, it does look like the franchise the original person hired was both incompetent and fly-by-night, given the comments, and then the original person patched things up just enough to pass muster and got out while they could.

As a PSA to the author- She stated in the sites comments that she wrote the article 10 years ago(2010-12ish) and that was the way she felt at the time it was written. She also acknowledges progress has been made since her home was built long ago and that some/most/all of the problems they have may now be solved. The impression I get from reading this is that: 1) the home was built by a franchisee that was cutting corners. 2) the marketing materials were believed without any additional research, but since the home was purchased in 1994 and this is early internet/AOL internet days at best. 3) They may have gone into it a bit naive.

Couple takeaways I have from this: 1) Building in the ground is hard, and doesnt just make the place magically efficient. 2) Be sure you arent stretching yourself financially to buy an 'innovative' home. Have the money or ability to fix the inevitable 'innovative' problems that crop up. 3) No home is maintenance free. 4) Seems to me that they need to scoop all the dirt off their home and do a full refurbishment/rebuild.

The author wasn't the original owner, the house was built years before they moved in. They purchased it for less than the original owner had paid to have it built, so it doesn't sound like they were stretching themselves too thin - they thought they were getting a good deal and would be able to deal with any issues that came up.

The fact that they own their own backhoe, and the pictures that they have shown, indicate that they have tried quite a lot of solutions, and as indicated in the article they are not interested in doing a full rebuild as it would not make financial sense, considering the depreciation of underground houses.

I dont think that was anything I was implying but you are correct. I was stating that in the big picture dont buy an unusual home if you are at the end of your budget. I think that they absolutely stated in the article that they could not afford to uncover the land and "fix" the home they way that was needed...

This is a lesson in being innovative. Pushing boundaries has costs. You can explore new ideas, rid yourself of legacy assumptions and arrive at some valuable things. But, you forgo the (often hidden) benefits of past mistakes and standard techniques that have all the kinks ironed out.

The problem with houses is that iteration is expensive. A lot of architectural innovations are actually a version 2. There's another building where the architect/builder learned from mistakes.

One of the virtues of living in a "cookie cutter" home that has been built hundreds of times --- most of the bugs have already been worked out.

Specifically a "cookie cutter" home for the same geography.

There is a lot of invaluable and invisible knowledge baked into decades or centuries of building tradition of each specific region.

I'm about to embark on a home building project myself. My wife keeps wanting a wood built house. In a country where there are hardly any... ...I just won't do it. no way.

I'm going on a traditional rubble wall building course next month so I can build some stone walls that are in keeping with our house. Also been looking at sourcing stone from local quarries - which is fortunately quite straightforward as a lot of stone is quarried around here.

If anyone is interested here are the charity that is running the course: https://www.scotlime.org/en/

Or using traditional architecture. I once lived in an apartment building that was obviously built in the 70's, and was trying to be cool and new by having all flat-angled roofs, rather than normal gabled roofs. (Sorry don't know the technical terms.) Every winter, giant hundred-pound icicles formed, threatening to drop at any time onto people walking in and out. Yeah, those gables over the entrances weren't for looks guys, they were solving a problem. Maybe you should have asked why they were there before getting rid of them.

Agreed. The main problem here appears to be the location not being very well-suited for underground housing. So, if this is a v1 underground house for the area, a lot of unintended oversights are to be expected, especially if the construction cost settled around the median for the area.

The thing is, houses which are half hidden by hillsides have been built for hundreds of years with basic materials in the alps, so i'd have thought there is a rich seam of information about what works, and how to tackle various problems (my parent's house is like this, with a whole floor difference in level between the back and front of the house and this doesn't have damp problems).

Yep, the "right" way dates back to Romans:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933056

A rich seam perhaps, but that needs to be "mined" and what you get is raw material.... uhm analogy still working right?

There's a big difference between "someone somewhere has done this and documented it" and "these exact builders have built 100s of these in my area." The gap between principle and practice.

Software design and engineering is very influential these days, obviously on HN. We need to remember that bits have all sorts of magic to them. One magic is refactoring, bug fixing and malleability generally. With a building, any "bug" in the initial build is usually there forever.

Climate matters as does location. Plus it was built in the 80s, I doubt any contractor in 80's Arkansas had any idea how to figure out about houses in the Alps even if they cared to.

A hole in the side of a mountain is pretty different from a hole in the middle of Oklahoma.

> But, you forgo the (often hidden) benefits of past mistakes and standard techniques that have all the kinks ironed out.

> The problem with houses is that iteration is expensive. A lot of architectural innovations are actually a version 2. There's another building where the architect/builder learned from mistakes.

I think it would be super interesting and useful if different disciplines could condense that process down into relatively readable technical histories, and make those a core part of their curriculum.

I think that would be super useful in software engineering, given the frequency that people seem to reinvent the wheel, some areas seem to oscillate back and forth between the same few concepts, and the path dependence that's locked us into others.

I grew up in an underground house, though not one as elaborate as this sounds.

It was mostly just a concrete house built into the side of a hill so that only the southern face is exposed.

When my parents moved in it had four feet of earth on the roof as well.

The roof would be dry the day it rained, but would start leaking two or three days after the rain was done.

They got tired of that. So they removed all the dirt and exposed the concrete, then just built a second story onto the house.

The main peculiar thing about that house from a broader perspective is that we treated the upstairs like most people treat a basement.

The main room in the upstairs was I think 20 feet wide by 60 feet long. And it had a concrete floor. Made for a good adolescent play area.

Right...I'm not done the article yet, but I wonder why they didn't just remove all the dirt from the roof, or install an impermeable membrane over the entire hill.

Budget constraints were why not, I suspect. It sounds like the house value never exceeded $150K, so adding at least $10K to excavate, membrane, and refill/recover probably exceeded available cash-in-hand.

What's more, removing tons of fill dirt above a finished space is likely to be a delicate enterprise without over-stressing or penetrating the concrete domes which were already weakened due to cracking and past patching.

Seems like their biggest problems are with the Arkansas climate. Like if you said "give me the closest thing you can to Cambodia, but at the 3th parallel" Arkansas would be tough to beat. Building the same home into the side of a hill with proper drainage at a more northerly latitude in a drier climate would likely yield much better results because it would demand so much less ability to shed moisture from the house.

Also it seems from the construction details I can infer from the article that the concrete serves as not only the structure keeping the earth out but as the interior walls to which everything that shouldn't get wet is attached. This seems dumb. Floating construction, if only on pressure treated spacers and foam, would likely work much better. If you really wanted to go all out you could have an air gap between the concrete and everything else i.e. Titan 2 silo.

Also, why the hell use drywall? Subways and tropical countries tile the crap out of everything for a reason. Sure it's cold but that's a better problem to have than damp drywall.

The air gap was one of my first thoughts. This is common on woodframed homes, where you have the a vapour barrier, insulation / insulation + framework, a moisture barrier, an air gap and then the water shedding layer (siding, render carrier, brickwork etc). Even in the UK where wood framing is less common it's almost identical to our roof structure where you have insulation, the roof framework (with ventilation in the eves), a water barrier (classically tar paper) and then the water shedding layer (concrete, slate or clay tiles).

I guess one challenge is how you would have sufficient ventilation in the gap underground, perhaps you'd have to use some kind of forced air ventilation with all of the problems that would entail.

However, by the time you ventilate that space you have now negated any thermal mass advantages you had from building under ground in the first place by introducing ambient air.

Adding water channels as well were my thought. Just as air gaps allow moist air to exit wall cavities, external drain channels should prevent water from pooling and penetrating.

Presumably in an underground house, you'd want your roof to have a big air gap that could serve both purposes -- excess water removal and moist air exhaust. I believe many house foundations routinely add an external air+water drain/gap layer like this.

While I can agree that living in an "underground house" is not for everybody, this article doesn't make sense in general. Most (if not all) problems are related with bad construction (leaks, floods during heavy rains, constant mold, pests, cracks during earthquakes), bad "fencing" and detail project (limited landscaping, people invade our privacy, difficult and expensive repairs), not with the kind of house itself. Was the house well built and this article wouldn't exist or the conclusion could be more favorable.

The only problem related with this kind of house might be depreciation. It's not mainstream and less liquid so you need to wait for the right buyer or sell it with a discount. However, the construction problems (it was clearly built by unexperienced contractors in this kind of building), certainly contribute a lot to repel possible buyers.

I disagree. leaks, floods, cracks are all clearly going to be worse. In my conventional house, if I have a leak in the roof I'll get a roofer in and have it fixed in a day or two. I feel for these people - it's a salutory lesson.

I think the lesson is you can't rely on the experience of traditional house builders to build a robust underground one.

Traditional house builders should have no problem building an underground house. It's not much different than building a basement, whoever built their house just did a shoddy job. If those builders made a traditional house with a basement with these same issues, you wouldn't come to the conclusion that traditional houses are bad or difficult to do.

I was going to say roughly the same thing.. Building bad foundations happens all the time and it seems less critical in a traditional house, but..

I know many houses that had incompetent foundation builders. The repair costs/complexity can be similar to the underground house even though the priority seems low in a traditional house. One of the houses was torn down due to the neglecting the problem. (It was a rental and no one cared about using the basement for the decade before it was inspected and condemned.)

In the underground case you really only have to get one thing right and it is just as stupid to get it wrong in the traditional case, but people are distracted and don't see it's priority.

Some friends bought a new house, to be built as part of a new housing site.

They got told by others who had already gotten their their homes built to avoid a certain contractor at all cost.

So they went with a large and reputable contractor, and things seemed to move along well. Then the guy decided to visit the site one day, and when he gets there he sees some slightly confused teenager at the bottom of a pit that was to become the basement. He asked what the teenager was doing there. "I'm here to pour the foundation", was the reply. It was obvious the kid was not in his element and did not really know what he was doing.

My friend was confused. First he confirmed the kid was working at the right place. The kid was. Then he asked how old he was and who he was working for. Well he was 17 and was the son of the contractor they were told to avoid at all cost...

Turned out the large reputable contractor didn't had sub-contracted out the work to the one firm they were trying to avoid.

I should have picked a better word than "traditional", which isn't quite right as you say. Perhaps "unproven", "run-of-the-mill", or "inexperienced". It may entirely within the skills of a good "traditional" contractor to do right, but there is at least a bigger downside with potential mistakes due cost of repair, if not a substantially greater chance of mistakes due to the abnormality of the building. So, it's important to be picky.

It looks like its much harder to do good construction underground.

And much, much harder to fix problems.

I wouldn't say it is harder, it just costs more. And an underground house is not the sort of thing to cheap out on because of the difficulty of repairs.

A cheap above ground house can have tons of repairs done, that shouldn't have had to have been done in the first place, but weren't prohibitively expensive to do anyways. An underground house can't just have new vinyl siding slapped on top of the old super garbage shit because you have to dig it up. So you have to spend the money upfront, rather than kick the can down the road.

Its harder because experience is not generally there - people usually don't live in a cave.

It's also harder because of the sheer mechanics of what working on the walls or ceiling looks like.

> Most (if not all) problems are related with bad construction

Underground houses or basements are plagued with this kind of problem because they seem to be really difficult to build properly, and really expensive to fix once they've been built.

I've never met anyone who's been happy with their basement. I've lived in four places that have basements (a mix of newish builds (since 2000) and old (1800s) builds and the basements have always been terrible, even if there had been extensive work making them less horrible.

One of the key things that led me to buying my house is that the original owner finished the basement in the 1920s shortly after the house was built and there was not a spec of rot on anything or any indication of moisture ingress. That and the walk-in access made it absolutely perfect for my use.

Seems like it's got a lot to do with experience with this kind of house. In Germany most houses have basements, and while yes, some do have problems with wetness as well, that's more of an exception. I currently live in a souterrain flat, that is quite nice.

My grandparents' house had a basement, which was cold but it was never damp. As kids we loved playing in it.

The thing is looking back I realise that the entire "ground floor" of the house was raised a good 6 feet up, so the basement only went a short distance into/under the ground. In fact the basement had a door which led straight out into the rear garden. (The "official" back door of the house was at the top of a flight of stairs). So that's how you build a basement that doesn't get damp :-)

In London this seems to be quite a common design for Victorian-era houses which is why many basement flats have access to the rear garden.

>the basement had a door which led straight out into the rear garden.

This is called, rather descriptively, a "walk-out basement".

Where in the world were these places? Our basement is just fine. But we are in Michigan where houses pretty much must have a basement due to frost. I wonder if the builders in areas like this have more experience with them.

How the hell does the article "not make sense"? The title specifically says "Our Underground House", and at the end they explicitly say they would consider choosing such a house again, under certain condition.

And pretty much all problems are related to the kind of house itself. That it's not mainstream means not just that you need the right buyer to sell it, but also that you need the right contractor to build it, since most won't have any experience with this kind, leading to bad construction. And while moisture and leaks are a problem for houses in general, they're a bigger problem for this kind. Finally, the basic concept guarantees that any kind of problem with the outer walls will be much more difficult and costly to fix than with a regular house.

The certain conditions they lay out don’t even make sense.

The author says they get nosebleeds at 50% humidity or less. Enjoy that drier climate. Honestly can’t believe they’d consider another underground home.

Real gluttons for punishment.

I'm not a specialist, but from my experience so far, every earth-covered underground structure (underground parking, subway station etc.) will eventually start leaking (exceptions might apply to really dry locations of course). It might last 40 years instead of 30 with better construction quality, but eventually you will have to dig it out (in part or fully) and repair it - which is obviously costly, especially if you have landscaping at ground level.

Isn't that true of any building though? Where I live most houses have ceramic roof tiles, and even though they are supposedly long-lasting, after 60-80 years they do need replacing (most home-owners replace them much more frequently, every 10-20 years). I've replaced tiles on my grandparents' house which was around 60 years old, because they became brittle and started cracking after hundreds of temperature cycles, hailstorms etc.

>Most (if not all) problems are related with bad construction (leaks, floods during heavy rains, constant mold, pests, cracks during earthquakes), bad "fencing" and detail project (limited landscaping, people invade our privacy, difficult and expensive repairs), not with the kind of house itself. Was the house well built and this article wouldn't exist or the conclusion could be more favorable.

The bad construction is the typical half-assery that homeowners expect to be able to get away with. Sure somebody who's frame of reference floats in the sea of flies through the air will probably not take much issue with it but for everyone else it kind of sucks to have to consider where moisture will go and break out the rotary hammer every time you wanna do something. Underground is basically hard mode and it kind of sucks to play on hard mode when everyone else is on easy mode.

> somebody who's frame of reference floats in the sea of flies through the air will probably not take much issue with it

My lexical parser has encountered a problem.

People who work on boats or planes aren't gonna consider an underground house particularly bad. If your frame of reference is normal houses then underground is really hard.

Oh, I get it, the frame of reference "floats in the sea or flies". I was trying to picture a "sea of flies".

》 not with the kind of house itself

I disagree. Normal house with free dry circulating air is very forgiving. It is also easy to fix, walls are freely accessible.

Underground structures are very difficult. Even most professionals will get it wrong.

That's my point. If that's your frame of reference then underground is hard. If you work on ships or something for a living then it's not so bad.

sorry, i missed initial quote

It's not an indictment of underground structure generally, but it is a cautionary tale about going your own way. "Bad construction" doesn't necessarily mean "bad builders." Even a mediocre builder/architect can erect a normal house without major issues. Even an outstanding builder/architect is likely to have major flaws erecting (does this apply underground) a highly unusual design. Innovation is harder.

The article is worth reading for anyone that wants to do this. Take all their issue. Make sure you have a solution for them all.

Also, I doubt the building regulations around underground structures is terribly well conceived. Especially in Oklahoma, where I imagine most underground "structures" are either basements, or serve as little more than storm shelters.

Most houses are designed and built to the minimum regulatory standards. It's expensive to overbuild structures, so people aren't going to do it unless they have a very specific reason to do so. Without any regulatory framework, or a bunch of experience, it's hard to expect anyone to get it right.

This house is not a basement, but it seems to be built like one. Basements have houses and roofs above them that serve to move water away from the structure and provide a source of dry, conditioned air from above ground.

Most of the discussions here are talking about the downsides of alternative home designs. In general, while there's going to be some failures, exploring new home designs should be encouraged--most of the world can't afford the construction style common in NA, and material science and advanced robotics lead to incredibly cheap alternative home construction possibilities. There's a ton of improved life statistics tied to home ownership. Especially with alternative home designs though, home inspections should absolutely be the most important and time consuming thing you do during a purchase.

I discovered this by lucky happenstance during my first home purchase, but a good home inspector will save you thousands of dollars, and sometimes more. While any sort of home inspection is not discussed in the article, I believe that an alternative construction building inspector (while costing more than a normal inspector) would have caught some of the more major issues mentioned here. If it's true that the leaks in the concrete were covered up long enough to sell the home, then most leak detection equipment would easily have caught it. Water damage, foundation issues and leaks are standard home inspection protocol. Additionally, it sounds like a fair amount of the termite issues could have been caught before the sale of the home, which is also a standard part of home inspections.

In the event of purchasing an alternative home like this, I would not hesitate to even hire multiple home inspectors, especially ones that know the house and the area. Even having a quick conversation with them ahead of time (Are you familiar inspecting concrete roofed homes?).

I cannot stress the need to get a good home inspector (my be even multiple) - even for a normal home. It's worth the money - I learned the hard way because I trusted a checklist inspector.

My home inspector worked exclusively in my town, with the most common housing construction type that my house was built with. I live in a town with a lot of 19th century homes. Not only was he able to tell me most of the common problems that occur in the homes, but exactly what remodels had been done to the home (like what was cheaply done, and what was done 'right'). He also gave me a fairly extensive list of contractors and maintenance people from around the area that he trusted, and encouraged me to contact him if I had any questions or concerns over the next couple years. Looking back on it, as a first time home buyer, I would pay 10x more for the service he gave me than what he charged.

It was eye-opening to go through a couple inspections as a seller and see what those inspectors missed versus the inspectors we had hired on purchase. For example, evidence of insect damage -- we had treated the issue of course, but the evidence was still there and should have been noted.

You should ask your agent for recommendations and avoid them, they'll be the checklist guys :-).

How do you even evaluate who is a good inspector or not?

I remember an article on HN a couple of years ago about the temptation to build a software system on specialty, "interesting" languages or libraries that seem adapted to your specific needs and desires.

But the downside is that it costs a lot to find people who can code in that language, there's little community support, and you run into equally specialized problems that are hard, expensive, and take a long time to fix.

It seems there are lessons that parallel this house experience.

RethinkDB in 2015.

Throughout reading the article I kept wondering why they didn't pursue the obvious solution : build a normal house next to it and move in. They have a nice plot of land and cost of conventional construction in Arkansas is low.

They could rent out the stupid underground house as a mushroom farm or bat sanctuary or just fill it with concrete and put a garage on top.

I happily lived in an underground house for several years.

However, there were some key differences in the design. My house had an above ground A frame roof with a door at ground level. The door opened to stairs going down to a second door to enter the living space. It looked like a house that had sunk 3/4s of the way into the ground.

I never had a any problems with pests or flooding and the heating and cooling costs were tiny, even with winters below freezing and summers in the mid 90s.

I guess technically it was a "mostly" underground house and in my experience that design worked really well.

Point 10. Cancer

“We replaced all damaged wood with treated timber and soaked it in creosote for good measure.”

Please, don’t do that. It’s a high suspect for cancer. Already some paints and most of the wood agglomerate glues are bad for health, but this!

Good luck still with your house, it’s vital to have a livable place for balance and creativity.

Interesting. Having grown up in the southwest I had only ever been exposed to creosote as in the bush that gives off the incredible smell when it rains in the Sonoran desert.

Reading on creosote tar and was interesting to see no citations (on Wikipedia) for the toxicity, and yet a couple studies against it:

“A 2005 mortality study of creosote workers found no evidence supporting an increased risk of cancer death, as a result of exposure to creosote. Based on the findings of the largest mortality study to date of workers employed in creosote wood treating plants, there is no evidence that employment at creosote wood-treating plants or exposure to creosote-based preservatives was associated with any significant mortality increase from either site-specific cancers or non-malignant diseases. “

This is really surprising. The stuff is horrible to use and if any substance has seemed toxic to me, it’s that.

Creosote is banned in the EU since 2009 (and since 1991 in Germany) for most uses, especially everywhere it might come in contact with humans. There are narrow exceptions for eg railroad ties and utility poles.

> (and since 1991 in Germany)

I remember that the presumed health risks were discussed years before that date, and it has been avoided by some even before the ban.

Are there any good studies on it? Seems like the tar can have bad effects due to buildup, but from a very brief search creosote in and of itself seemed fine.

Around here, they sell used railroad ties at places like Home depot & Lowe's... probably not a good idea.

Politics often ban things without any evidence. EU bans many things without scientific justification.

And in the state of California everything causes Cancer. The EU likes to ban things before actual evidence of harm

And the US only bans things after the company that profits from them finally is beaten after decades of political lobbying and judicial precedent.

See: CFCs, Dioxin, Asbestos, Global Warming, Glycophoshate, Neonicotinoids, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

The stories of US companies knowingly and psychopathically killing people just to make a dollar are hard to comprehend.

Its like slowly dropping bricks on people’s heads, destroying one life after the other, for literal decades. With rarely any consequences for the decision makers.

Wikipedia also says that creosote is literally meat preservative and that it used to be used to save meat from spoiling.

So is saltpetre. It doesn't mean that it's safe in every form for every application. Doesn't even mean that it's safe in meat.

Wikipedia also says smoked meat consumption is correlated with intestinal cancer...

Creosote refers to both a tar substance and the result of wood combustion (smoke), which is a bit less toxic. For instance Seirogan pills are wood creosote.

My house just burned in a wildfire. The creosote railroad ties previous owners had used for landscaping and retaining walls all over the property continued to burn for days. It smelled terrible and likely contributed to the house catching fire in a flare up. So yeah, I don’t recommend creosote.

I am so sorry that happened to you, what will you do?

Rebuild to fit our dreams all the better. Just a process to get there...

The first clue that you're going to have water problems are the steps leading down to your front door. You built a catch basin to live in.

Second clue is it is made from concrete. Concrete by itself is not water tight. It can be made water tight but some significant effort is required. Just ask anyone who has ever built a basement.

"we were able to purchase the house for $45,000 less than the cost to build it. "

It was sold on a massive loss (around 150k to build years earlier). There must be something terribly wrong judging by the price alone.

Not necessarily - prices in the region might have depreciated overall, maybe it was built in a market high and sold at a market low point.

The people/company selling it might have had other monetary problems and were thus selling because they needed money and couldn't afford to wait.

If you build an underground house it is probably because you want an underground house, if you then die your heirs might not want an underground house, but to sell it they have to find someone who wants an underground house, thus to make it more interesting to buy they lower the price because maybe someone on the fence about living in an underground house will be willing to give it a try.

If there is an oversupply of houses in an area, prices will be less than the cost of construction. Some people still build new because they want something in particular. If they then have to sell, well, they are going to sell at a loss no matter how good the house is.

Yup. Never buy a house where the driveway slopes down the the garage. It'll flood the garage. Even if you put a trench before the garage door, it'll still flood because the trench will fill with leaves, slush, etc.

I have a house where my driveway slopes down to my garage. There is a drain at the center near where the garage comes down. Should I schedule some kind of repair to clean it out periodically so it doesn't flood?

There haven't been any problems so far, but I live in Seattle which doesn't actually rain that much (in terms of inches per year - 38 average vs 47 for New York) despite its reputation. It's gloomy and drizzles a lot, so that's probably where the reputation comes from, but it rarely really rains like the kind of rain you'd get in a Houston rainstorm.

I'm in Seattle too, and have neighbors with driveways that slope to the garage, with a trench drain or a swale drain. Their garages flood.

The trouble is leaves, and when it snows a foot or two, the slush clogs any attempt at drainage.

Putting 1/4" steel mesh over the grate will at least make the leaf clogs visible so you can clean it.

When it snows heavily, you'll need to proactively shovel the drain clear, and clear the snow between the garage door and the drain.

Sounds like bad design. Are the garages sitting above the bottom of the driveway? Where I live all the driveways that slope to the garage are built to have gradient on the driveway to help water runoff the sides (onto soil) abd before the driveway meets the garage there is a concrete slab that slopes up into the garage. The surface of the garage is a few inches above the bottom of the driveway.

You absolutely need to clean any drain like that in Seattle periodically. Source: lived in Seattle and have nearly flooded a basement due to a drain clogged with leaves and mud.

New constructions in Seattle have been eschewing basements. See https://www.quora.com/Do-homes-in-Seattle-have-basements

I'm not sure if it is just purely stylistic or if they were more trouble than they were worth so builders stopped digging them in.

When we were looking at houses, we couldn't really stand most of the older ones because the basements were so dreary. There was just nothing to do with them, yet they were counted in so much of the home's square footage.

That’s not an issue if the garage is built higher than the bottom of the driveway. The concrete slab in front of the garage door should have a slight incline leading into the garage. The garage should be a few inches above the ground level. Drains where the driveway meets the slab can help too.

Lots of homes in my area are constructed on inclines with houses on one side rising from the street and the other side declining from the street. With some basic civil engineering principles (water flows downhill) we don’t see any issues with water in basements or garages, etc.

This was my first thought, too. Even started fantasizing how I would put a moat in front of the top of the stairs to drain the water away (and stop neighbors roaming).

Could concrete be substituted for the underground use case, like putting a metal container into the ground and call it a home? I'm fascinated with the idea of having a house with (mostly) passive temperature control. Could an underground design help with that?

Fourier reportedly applied his eponymous series in verifying the vernacular architectural choice of 2-3 metre depth for cellars.

For a modern presentation, see https://topex.ucsd.edu/geodynamics/HW3_2010_presentations/C_...

Autographic notes might be found in the vicinity of https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9061905f/f9.image.r=f...

The closest to a cellar discussion I find in his 1822 book is: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1045508v/f43.item but in this book I only find him working out the zero variation depth, not the depth for six-month temperature lag. Anyone have a title for the cellar paper? (just before giving up I found Mémoire sur la température du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires, which mentions that one would need a good sampling of local reflectivity and plenty of computation to derive global heating due to insolation.)

Big corrugated culvert and Quonset huts have been buried as temporary military installations. Steel rusts and aluminum and stainless are expensive.

If you want a waterproof container I'd look into used plastic or fiberglass industrial process tanks (preferably ones that held something not too nasty, so likely from the food industry), dig a hole, do proper compaction and gravel base then plop the tanks in (fill them with water or something so they don't float away) and then pour concrete around them for strength (leaving holes for your vents and doors and whatnot). You're going to have to become well versed in chemistry and construction to prevent all your "rooms" from leaking at the doorways where you have cut holes to join them together.

I worked for some time at a former nuclear weapons research facility where a number of Transite composite asbestos Quonset huts were built in the 50's and used through the 2000's.

Checking google maps, it appears that they've finally remediated these structures, but they were in fine condition up until then.

Asbestos ones last a lot longer than the steel ones. The galvanization slowly fails around the edged where there's exposed metal and trapped moisture. They do last a long time but I wouldn't want to put one underground where I couldn't fix it and where any rust hole instantly becomes a leak.

See the youtube example below.

An underground home needs substantial strength to resist the weight of the soil all around it. Concrete is strong and cheap but porus --- not watertight. To make it water tight, you need a sealed membrane that extends all the way under the foundation. Otherwise, water/moisture will be seep up through the floor. Saturated soil surrounding your home will exhibit water pressure from gravity trying to force it into your home. The required moisture membrane is subject to being broken during construction or afterwards from settlement.

Personally, if I was sold on the concept, I would look at the possibility of building up --- not down. Think of a tube open on the ends or a box open on one side but otherwise covered by a mound of soil. The foundation could rest on one big French drain system and this could be extended up the sides as well. This way, the force of gravity can pull water away from the home, not into it.

Here’s an example https://youtu.be/Z0oFJ2jbkDI

Underground container would have surprisingly terrible temperature control, because it would be in direct contact with the damp earth. Building a (waterproof) shell inside the container could work pretty well though.

> The first clue that you're going to have water problems are the steps leading down to your front door. You built a catch basin to live in.

Their property is on a what looks to me to be quite a steep hill. I.e. the steps lead down to the front door, then there's their living space, then their deck is on supports above the slope.

I know nothing about water levels etc. in buildings. Is this still as much as problem (since it's only a "catch basin" from the one side of the slope)?

With the right drainage from the high side it wouldn't be, but without proper drainage it can pool together there and cause problems.

It wouldn't have to be, but they obviously didn't have enough drainage. It is really hard to know this before hand though as the proper drainage is mostly underground where you can't inspect it.

I don't know very much about housing and construction, but this part set off a big red flag to me:

We should have been forewarned when we were able to purchase the house for $45,000 less than the cost to build it.

Yeah, that should have been a forewarning about everything. Someone else knew that the house was a lemon, and they managed to dump it off on this unfortunate buyer.

I don't know about Arkansas real-estate, but my sister has moved a couple of times in Missouri and Kansas and has never paid above the cost of building the house, and once paid much less.

Structures are depreciating assets, and in many parts of the US the land does not appreciate enough to cover that up.

Interesting, I guess all my real estate experience is in coastal-type areas where any sale priced below a previous sale is a red flag. TIL

Sounds like most of Japan, where I think some structures (condos?) are separated from land appreciation, so this can happen even in a hot area like Tokyo.

I kept trying to pick a thing in that article to call out as a warning here but the hits. Just. Kept. Coming.

Instead I will just recommend two things to anyone dreaming of buying a house. Start watching This Old House, [especially] the back catalog. Almost everything that can go wrong on a house has gone wrong there. And remember this while watching it:

Intelligent people learn from their own mistakes, while wise people learn from the mistakes of others.

The “cat litter” crack about bentonite clay: bentonite is nearly the only way people discuss for building an artificial pond if you don’t want to use a synthetic liner. But you don’t get a pond by sealing half of the hole you dug (and it takes a lot of clay). The water just runs out somewhere else. Or in this case, in.

Edit: Old TOH > New TOH

> Start watching This Old House,

I feel like I must be missing something about this show, because any time in my entire life that I have watched it, it seems to be just small spots of them using some expensive tool to fix some obscure problem.

It never felt deep or cohesive to me. Just random walk throughs of houses that I assume have to be owned by wealthy people to afford all the work being done.

I recently learned that I actually really enjoy The Woodwrights Shop, so maybe it's a similar thing of me just not being old enough to appreciate what they're doing?

I don't know what they've been dealing with the last few years, but it used to be practically a cliche that they'd discover the foundation was cracked or the corner of the house was solid wood rot, and the estimate for the renovation would increase by 50% overnight.

There is going to be some of that as part of what they do is demonstrating new technologies and techniques for old problems.

The scale of the renovations has definitely grown exponentially over the years, so it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier seasons where their projects were more modest. I remember some of them struggling more with budget then the more recent projects seem to.

Also a warning to people watching "This Old House":

The seasoned, professional, competent tradespeople you see on every episode are a nonexistent myth in most areas of the country. Many of the projects they accomplish with relative ease are not practical to the more junior tradespeople you will be able to find, and they will be fantastically expensive if you find the veterans you see on the show.

I think you're saying, "But they're not a good example of the things that can go right," and I'd have to agree. As a cautionary tale memories of that show delayed me buying my first house by almost five years. And I should have vetoed some things my partner was okay with that bit us even though I knew better.

I recall thinking for instance how unrealistic it was how often they knew a guy who knew a guy who could get them a nice reclaimed piece to greatly reduce the money:quality ratio for a bathroom, a staircase, a fireplace or a gable. From a standpoint of normalizing recycling and reclamation, thumbs way up. But nobody is that lucky when the cameras are off. I'm sure extra favors were returned off-camera (in addition to the brief infomercial)

TOH is one of the better shows in this respect. While they don't flaunt the costs of renovations, which often exceed a half million dollars, they do make a serious effort to show the experience and professionalism that the tradesman have. The hosts are always interviewing tradesman to ask what, why, and how they are doing something, and offering questions that you should ask any potential contractor.

With most other renovation shows, the tradesman are just magic fairies that don't do much more than assist the host, who it seems is single-handedly doing the work.

I think the trick is that just like in most jobs, the people need to not work in isolation and have a support network.

We had major water damage a few years back in our brand new house, and we hired a reputable local small contractor to fix it. Most of the work was done by his sons, who were in their late 20's to early 30's, but he was on site to discuss the work done beforehand, and numerous times during the work to direct. You can bet if any of them had a problem or question, they would work with each other and their father to come to a good solution combining their experience. They did very high quality work.

I would rather have a worker of below average experience with an expert to manage and provide direction to them than an average level worker in field that doesn't rely disproportionately on skill of an individual.

Given the limited space, the builder should have put a driveway over one wing. That would simplify some of the maintenance problems. The surface space is essentially useless as is anyway. Maybe find a better way to deal with the Sarlacc pit too. That can't be pleasant in heavy downpours.

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.812992,-92.3296159,3a,75y,18...

The neighbor's wheel-less Jeep brought back memories :) Jacks? Who needs jacks?

Bonus: Another neighbor's solution to their undrained driveway flooding the garage. Just leave a gap at the bottom to let it flow back out.

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.8129841,-92.3292783,3a,59.4y...

> One particularly stormy night, a torrent poured into the front atrium from the street above the house and flooded the great room. ... Who would have thought to buy flood insurance for a house high upon a hillside?

Presumably someone that noticed that the street is above the house, and there are entrances to the house with higher land on all sides of them? Those both seem like red flags to me.

I'm not sure how much of the water problems are endemic to the type of house and how much are from poor planning and placement by the original architect and builders, but at least some of it looks to be because of poor planning and building.

I would highly recommend a slopped roof over the steps leading to the house such that it directs the water away from the steps and the house.. or as others have pointed out, you will be constantly fighting water entering your house.

Second thing I would do is direct water away from other parts of the house by building a bore hole about 5-10 ft deep and about 1.5ft to 2ft diameter, in the lowest corner of the house. Use bricks to line the wall of this hole but with gaps to allow the water to drain into the hole.

Have a small, reasonably quiet electric motor which will run about 5-10 minutes every 2 hours or so (use a timer) to clear the water in this hole. This hole can be covered over with a tile(s) so that it is not obvious to those using that section of the house. Water from other parts of the house walls will drain into this hole reducing mold and other issues.

Thirdly, build a small slope around the entry into the house such that the water drains away from the house, preferably into a drain.

What is up with all the deaths of people that cross this house? The realtor, the contractor giving an estimate..

Also most of the plants died as well.

random chance and age. The house was built in the 1980s, that is 40 years for things to happen.

Rural area with high average age (plus young brain drain) combined with average life expectancy.

Damn, this is a shame but at least they are honest with themselves and can look at this with an objective lens. Personally the idea of an underground house just screams problems to me, but I wonder if that's misplaced and there are people with well constructed underground homes that they've remained happy with long term.

> I told my husband to either turn off the (expletive) AC or turn on the gas logs. He turned off the AC. In the past, we have found it necessary to run both simultaneously.

Running both the AC and the heater is actually standard procedure for reducing humidity as quickly as possible. You should try it more often! It's a useful trick not only for your home but also for your car, when you need to fix foggy windows in cold & damp weather.

A heater on its own will not move any H2O from the inside of your home to the outside. It merely lowers the relative humidity, which will go right back up as soon as the air gets cold again. The AC, on the other hand, actually pumps water out by collecting condensate in the evaporator. But this doesn't work very well when the temperature is already lower than the lowest possible setting for your AC. So you use the heater to increase the temperature, kicking the AC into action. The result is the best of both worlds: moderately warm, dry air.

Source: I live in a very humid place. Forecast for tomorrow night: 59F with 95% humidity.

a dehumidifier would probably be more efficient than heating and cooling the air...

It is the same thing. A dehumidifier is just an Air conditioner followed by a heat pump.

Though I agree more efficient.

Said a different way;

A dehumidifier is just an air conditioner with the evaporator and condensor in the same air space.

air conditioner; does that mean adding a smell to the air?

95% of their problems are due to poor planning and shoddy construction. If they built it right from the start, it would still be great. But because of the nature of being underground, "simple" repairs stop being cheap or simple. So you gotta spend the cash upfront to do it right the first time.

This is a lesson in don't cheap out and kick the can down the road. Do it right the first time so you don't gotta redo it a second or third time, especially when redoing it involves digging up your entire house.

They bought it in 1994, before everything you ever needed to know about construction was on the internet. Short of having a preexisting familiarity with underground construction or having a buddy who designed missile silos their ability to identify potential future problems was likely quite limited.

True but I remember reading books, or collections of articles, on construction as a kid in the 70's and 80's with imprints like Mother Earth News and (iirc) Foxfire and more mainstream ones by Readers Digest, Time-Life, and Sunset. They covered things like this. It wasn't entirely out of reach if you went to a library.

A lot of their problems are related to bad construction, but it's important to recognize that this house design is hard to construct well. Water is the most insidious thing to a house, and builders are not particularly great at waterproofing even above grade structures. In the case of an underground structure, that water hangs around and has a lot of time to find its way in.

"By the way, the realtor probably couldn't have cared less about a fraudulent sale charge because he moved to Mexico immediately thereafter and died a year later"

"In 2010, I found a roofer who made an estimate of $100,000 to repair the roof, but he said he wasn’t sure he wanted to tackle the job. We told him that we owned a backhoe and would remove the layers of dirt and insulation ourselves. Unfortunately, he died unexpectedly only two weeks after making the estimate."

At some point in the beginning they probably should have already consulted an Exorzist, or similar, or alternatively burned it all to the ground.

I have an underground house in the UK. Much of the same issues apply. I too have stalactites coming down from my ceiling!

The main issue is damp coming through all the damp membranes from the floor, the ceiling, and the walls.

If I wanted to solve it, I would knock all the internals of the house out, and then build a new house inside the current one. The outer house to keep the soil out, and the inner house for waterproofing. I'd have pumped air circulating between the houses to evaporate any water that manages it through the outer house.

This is a fascinating idea but sounds crazy. You would basically have a house in a cave. Would you prefer that over just building your house on open land?

In my case, my house can't be more than ~1 foot above ground level or it would block someone elses (legally protected) right to a view.

So it has to be 90% underground, and parts of it have ~10 feet of soil above.

When was your house built?

1994

Buying a too-large backhoe SIGHT UNSEEN then letting it sit in the yard for 15 YEARS?

If they put a similarly nonexistent amount of time and effort into researching fixing their drainage problems as they did selecting and purchasing what's probably their most expensive and difficult to transport tool, I'm going to assume this quite possibly is an easy fix for someone more competent and disciplined.

Edit: I wonder if they installed the hot-tub on the deck while the wrong backhoe was rusting nearby.

There is a whole city in Australia that has almost exclusively underground houses. Seach for "Coober Pedy" on youtube for one of the many documentaries about that city.

There is an ancient city in Jordan called Petra built in similar ways for similar reasons. It's quite amazing to walk around. The "caves" are more cool and pleasant than air conditioned buildings even when the desert outside is baking hot. Worth visiting.

Coober Pedy is more a small town than a city, and it is not the only one. White Cliffs, NSW, is also mostly underground. I suspect there are others.

Isn't it also in a desert which would remove all the mould and humidity issues?

Yes, it's incredibly hot and dry, and doesn't get much rain. Going by Wikipedia, they had 30mm (1.2") of rain in 1921. Averages about 21 days a year with >1mm of rain.

Not to armchair quarterback this or anything but.... this sounds like a pretty simple problem to fix, WITHOUT spending a bunch of money. dig up a few feet of soil around the house (they said they have an excavator), put down a geo-membrane sloping away from the house, install a primary and backup drawdown well pumps (I forget the correct term, but its what is normally done around landfills and environmental hazard sites) to pump out water that manages to get through, and cover it all back up with proper surface drainage to remove as much water from the ground cover as possible. Water coming in the front door, may have to think about an above ground roof covering for that, or a removable storm shutter, or additional pumps. Keeping water out, even fixing old water infiltration problems, is civil engineering 101. They called a roofer and a concrete worker to fix a civil problem.

Sounds like a nightmare!

There's no way I could consider buying a house like this second hand - how can anyone do any research on it without exposing the structure? Looking inside will only tell you so much.

And, if this was a house I'd build myself, again how would I know what would stand the test of time? What good are guarantees if a company goes bust?

I love the idea, but would have to be very happy about that this had all the details had been worked out - and I don't see that I would be able to cross that threshold. Maybe if I lived in a dry (not temperate) environment this would have a better chance.

Air is a wonderful thing. I bought my dream house a couple years ago, a supposedly passive solar earth berm house, built into the south slope of a hill in southwestern Wisconsin.

First, passive solar isn’t. It needs to be so well engineered, and even then you likely need active systems to transfer heat from the storage medium (eg fans and ducts blowing over a rock bed). My house has huge windows, but the sun shines on normal drywall and the wood floor of the upper level. And of course it’s still cool in late spring when the sun stops contributing much gain and it’s still hot in late July when it starts creeping through the windows again.

Second, it’s damp. Humidity spikes like hell in the summer. I have to run a dehumidifier to keep things below 60%, and I have no idea what I’d have to do to get things below 50%. All three levels are bermed, with a cinder block wall. With the west-east orientation, we can get some halfway decent ventilation on the upper level, but we aren’t high enough up the hill to be assured of a steady breeze (we’re down in the hollow), maybe 20 or 30 feet in elevation above our creek that mercifully drains heavy rains away.

With a normal house above ground, things can dry out from the outside and, especially, you can open enough windows and catch a breeze to air the house out. It is just a far more robust way to go. At a minimum I am going to need to redo the attic insulation, seal all the ceiling joints, and put in an ERV to provide greater ventilation and dehumidification, not to mention new AC/heat pump minisplits. I also think I may need to partially excavate the berm and throw in a proper French drain, and I’m worried that I should just do a full excavation of the back, two levels down, in order to apply proper sealing on the exterior, and perhaps throw some drains under the slab.

With building science today, you can build a frame house tight enough, a “pretty good house,” stick some solar panels on it, and use far less energy while maintaining comfort, and it doesn’t take nearly the engineering and careful building that a bermed or underground house does.

I love my little hobbit hole with the big windows. I’m fortunate to be a software engineer with good enough prospects and investments to be able to afford a minor folly on a second/eventual retirement home. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone trying to build equity with their primary home.

If you are building below grade, W.R. Grace Bituthene is what you want: https://gcpat.com/en/solutions/products/bituthene-post-appli...

On the outside of course so that water pressure presses it more tightly against the surface. It is like Grace Ice and Water Shield but is suitable for vertical application. Unlike liquid membranes, the sheets will always have the required thickness and you can inspect for overlapping joints. As a commercial product there are factory technical reps whose job is to help insure the reputation of the product.

However, the real lesson in the article is you can't afford custom construction if there is any question about affordability. The major issues with the house are design issues. A few hundred hours of architectural design work that didn't happen resulting in some thousands of dollars of site work that didn't happen and some thousands of dollars of materials that weren't installed and so on.

I feel like the drainage/leaks/flooding is the biggest issue, with difficulty in repairs being second. I've had to deal with leaks, limited landscaping, cracks from earthquakes, difficult and expensive repairs, depreciating home value, pest problems, and people invading my privacy in conventional wood frame homes. I imagine I would also have more experience with mold if I didn't live in a dry region.

Ironically enough, the earth-bermed house my mom purchased in 2012 appears seems to be the most durable overall because it's owner built and they spent time/effort/thought on drainage, functionality, maintenance, safety, etc... The only significant downside is earthquake insurance is prohibitively expensive because the lower level is masonry and was built before a certain point in time. I'm fairly certain it's reinforced with rebar, but it wasn't required to be in the building code at that point and insurance treats it as unreinforced masonry because of that.

The listed pros of living in the underground house:

Protection from tornados, Lots of natural light, Great views, No noise from the street or neighbors, Pets seem to love it, Being closer to nature

I think only the tornado protection might be an argument. Otherwise the house does not have to be underground? I expected arguments like 'natural insulation' and 'less disturbing to the landscape'

problem is - as they discovered - the natural insulation isn't very good. It is better than a house built in 1880, but by 1970 builders knew how to do better. Today better insulation is required by code in the US.

If it touches the ground, it gets moist. So it has to be solid rock or steel. Maybe some plastic might work.

A cellar can be built if you surround it with gravel and install drainage pipes everywhere - and protect the outer wall with plastic or tar - and even then it doesn't last very long and problems with moisture are frequent so you have to dig and expose it again every now and then.

The best houses sit high on solid granite foundation pieces and are ventilated from below. They have steeply sloping roofs and long eaves. They have the minimal amount of holes in the floor or roof (preferably no cellar or skylights). They are built on a knoll so no water flows towards the building from any direction. Rain water from the roof is directed away with gutters and ditches. All building materials are breathing and can be dried if they get wet (no plastic or glass wool).

Why don't tornado prone areas have more safe home options other than going entirely underground? Like an actual concrete home or more use of steel beams? I know it's more expensive but with the tornados seemingly increasing in intensity due to climate change, they're still less expensive than starting over entirely with a new home.

Probably still not economically feasible: "Lloyd’s of London puts the odds of a structure in Tornado Alley ever taking a direct hit from a tornado at 5,000 to 1." [1]

[1] https://www.builderonline.com/building/predictable-destructi...

It’s much more reasonable to build/install a storm shelter and - in the unlikely event that you must use it - let insurance bear the cost of repairing/rebuilding the home, putting your family in a hotel, etc.

I've recently read about ICF (Insulating Concrete Form) houses fairing well in tornado environments, with an anecdotal report about a neighborhood whose ICF houses mostly stood after being otherwise flattened by a large tornado. Here[1] are some more reports on that. ICF seems like a decent compromise between a typical NA wood+drywall home and a moldy concrete fortress. Basically a lego-like form of blocks is built and a lighter concrete mix is sprayed into it then the blocks removed.

I've been tracking Handeeman[2] on youtube since about a year after started their homestead in SE Arizona which is how I first heard about ICF as they just raised a new ICF home on their property. The guy does some great drone and video work tracking his progress and it's honestly quite inspiring to watch them go. They are trying to rely totally on rainwater collected from the brief annual monsoon rains and eventually to be self-sustaining with their vegan lifestyle.

1: https://icfhomesofva.com/2019/02/14/icfs-turn-tornados-into-... 2: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0s0qC96lCcx2pO2za6mcw

Tornados are strong winds - it is hard to build anything that will stand a big one. That said, modern engineering has learned a lot and new houses will fare better (but they may not survive either)

Coincidentally I recently read that a Tsilhqot'in family in the Cariboo area of British Columbia is building a traditional "pit house" of the sort their ancestors would have used for thousands of years.

https://www.thefreepress.ca/news/a-pit-house-for-a-tsilhqoti...

I suspect this Tsilhqot'in family will have more success than those in this article because they will be listening to elders, considering traditional proven techniques, and most importantly, their location and environment matches the house style.

The lands of the Tsilhqot'in are in the rain shadow of the coast mountains, so dryer than other parts of BC. They will accordingly most likely not suffer mold issues and since Cariboo summers can be very hot, their pit house will most likely be a cool refuge.

Conceptually an underground house is like a bungalow version of a house that has a large basement (and a earth roof).

In the UK I know basements (that have a house above them, not earth) to be near universally damp and miserable places.

In London the rich and famous are known to go down when it comes to house extensions, with ever larger basements. Sure the climate is different, and building tech has advanced, but I wonder if the posh homes with vast basements harbour problems. Particularly when adding features such as pools, deluxe bathrooms and gyms.

Every generation comes along to think they will not make the mistakes of their forefathers. It seems to be a game you can't win at. Lead works good under ground when it comes to keeping stuff out for centuries, so maybe you need to spend serious money on making a lead lined tomb and then lining that so there is no danger of getting lead poisoned.

Its perfectly possible to make dry basements.

In the same way its perfectly possible to make dry houses (we are used to damp proofing in houses, less so in basements)

Put it this way, we've managed to make swimming pools that don't leak, underground houses are basically swimming pools with roofs.

Firstly you need to choose your ground and prepare it properly. You then need to choose your materials. With basements you can either put the tanking on the outside, in the material or or on the inside. Each has its own merits.

Then you need to think about insulation and ventilation. You will be at a different temperature to the outside world for most of the year. You therefore need to think about how you manage humidity.

You are proving my point. Everyone knows best and thinks that they won't make the mistakes of the past when it comes to making bone dry basements that will work in perpetuity.

The people in the article did not set out to make their home even more damp and the original builders did not set out to make it damp. They thought they knew what they were doing.

With British town houses that have basements the original ground dug out for the foundations went into the road which is built up by a storey. The basement faces out into the garden, the sides join with neighbouring houses in the terrace. The front has a gap to the road that has a containing wall. Coal and stuff could be delivered to the basement area with a hatch in the road in some areas.

Despite this sophisticated no-digging approach to a basement and dry walls on all sides there is still a damp problem that has to be managed.

You can't just hold back water in earth with concrete, plastic or anything else 'waterproof' as it will rot away or prove to get damp in time. Even with clay that prevents oxygen getting to steel, steel will rust away too.

We wouldn't have these problems if we had stayed in the trees.

My mother bought a house next to a bog. Needless to say, with the drainage being almost non-existant, it has started seeping in water, especially during the spring. There has been some exceptionally warm winters in the North of Norway the last few years, but we've also had record snow, so when it thaws, everything goes at once, leading water to saturate the boggy earth, and then to seep into the house. Luckily it can be fixed by digging out new drainage trenches, and filling them with felt and gravel, accordingly, to filter the water out into a small drainage brook nearby. It's still going to cost a fair bit to get it done, though, and proper drainage could have saved us the problem in the first place. Luckily the insurance company will rework the inside, as panels got wet and need dehumidifying and mold-extinction.

The temperature of the ground at shallow depths corresponds to the mean annual air temperature (MAAT). If the MAAT in your location is 15.5C/60F, that's the temperature of your underground house. If you let in warm, damp air, it will condense inside. If there are any flaws in the drainage or waterproofing, it will get wet inside. If 15.5C is a little cool for you, you can insulate and install hardware to control the temperature and humidity. At this point, you've decoupled the internal environment from the surrounding environment.

You're not 100% underground, so you're still not 100% protected from tornados or fire or bullets or COVID-22 zombies. Underground houses don't seem like a good solution for most situations. Passive House for the win!

If you are curious on some excellent YouTube videos on drainage techniques and various way to install them. I highly recommend the Apple Drains channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/appledrains

For example, I had no idea that there is such a thing as an outdoor sump pump which can be used to pump water uphill if your drainage issues are below street level. That doesn't apply to my case since you can't use these in my town but none of the landscapers I've spoken to even mentioned it.

The host is very likeable as well.

How do you go about and build your own dream home?

Buy a property. Tear it down. Get a contractor. Get a construction loan. After it’s done, then convert that to a normal mortgage. Can anyone share their experiences in going this route?

Your question is so general that I'm inclined to say that you need to do more research and refine it more. If you're asking what you're asking you're not yet qualified to oversee the process.

The sane way of going about "building one's dream home" is dependent on a bunch of variables that you don't define.

Basically you have two options, be rich enough that you can pay for whatever the hell you want or be moderately skilled in just about everything and do it all yourself.

Regardless of which path you take you probably also want to do it somewhere that's rural, poor or preferably both so that nobody cares what you do. All the problems involve people. Busybody neighbors, local officials, etc so the more people you can cut out of the equation the better because each of these introduces a whole new set of problems and acts like a stress multiplier.

Like everything else in life the faster you want to go from start to finish the more it will cost.

Thank you Captain Obvious.

There are plenty of general contractors that will do this for you. For a fee they will buy a property - most have a selection or properties in various subdivisions to choose from or you can bring your own (note that if you want in a subdivision you will probably find that the developers sell all/most of the property to general contractors before starting work - their bank won't finance things without that). If there is tear-down needed they will arrange that. They will help you get a print that can be legally built. They have deals with banks to get you loans. They will deal with sub-contractors to do the other work. Then you just need to get the final loan which again they will help you with (as in they won't start if they don't think you can get one)

You can do this yourself. However you will have a hard time getting loans. There are two problems. First you have to pay for the place you are living (and then get rid of it!) while also paying for the new place that you will live. Most people are paying as much to live in one place as they can afford (this is right out of Adam Smith), so it is unlikely. Second, banks don't know if you can actually manage all the details, they don't want to be left when a half built house when you divorce (it is very common for couples to divorce over the stress of building a house).

Be very careful about budget if you do this. I know a contractor who can look at a print and estimate the final cost - if he builds the print he will be within a thousand of the final cost. When he builds for someone else the final cost is almost always $30,000 more than his estimates - the floor plan is the same but all the little upgrades added up. This is even though every time someone asks about an upgrade he warns them their price goes up and the house won't be worth any more.

Nice response. Thanks. I was looking for personal anecdotes and experiences here.

from what I've seen, you have your order wrong--get the loan before you tear down the old place, unless you have enough money to secure the loan yourself. I've known several people here who started the teardown first, and then tried to get a loan, at which point the bank told them no because the property, with no house on it any longer, was no longer worth enough to secure the loan.

"Having a window relaxes your eyes during this era of stay-at-home pandemic and 10+ hours of screen time." I view screens all day for both work and recreation. This much more than when I was in an employers office where I could move about periodically. Opening a window with a distant view really improved my eye hygiene. Gazing out a window every minute or two, focusing the eyes at 20 or 100 feet really helps relax them. I could image a whole new generation of coke-bottle-eyeglass kids who spent two much screen time at home school, then video games afterwards.

One of the cons of underground living the article doesn't go into is radon exposure. Depending on where your house is located this can be a significant health risk.

I thought Radon was mostly an issue with granite bedrock and granite houses with poor ventilation?

Is it a universal issue wherever you dig into the soil?

It mostly depends on where your house is located, if the minerals contain uranium, and then type of building material, level of ground air intake and ventilation.

"Some types of rocks have higher than average uranium contents. These include light-colored volcanic rocks, granites, dark shales, sedimentary rocks that contain phosphate, and metamorphic rocks derived from these rocks." (https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/7000018/report.pdf)

See also this map of the areas in the US which documents radon levels, which however doesn't predict radon levels of each house, only points to a general risk.

https://www.epa.gov/radon/find-information-about-local-radon...

I lived in a garden unit in Chicago for a year. I hated it. Luckily it never flooded, but that was always a worry. The bugs though; I hear you on that. I could not get rid of ants no matter how much I cleaned and sprayed. It was a constant battle with those bastards.

I remember the basement in my parent's home also having a bug problem when growing up. I would hate to buy a unit like this that's essentially 100% basement.

Does anyone know how the outer shell of underground missile silo bunkers is constructed? Those go very far underground and presumably would be impermeable.

Missile silos are multiple feet thick and cost millions to build. They're an entirely different category of building.

That said, most still have water penetration issues that need to be addressed. I've seen many that have to have sump pumps running 24/7 to keep the water out.

When I was a kid, I dreamed up a whole underground house- a deep cylinder with rooms radiating out from that (kind of like Wool). My dad said "the big problems are getting natural light in, and keeping water out."

Over time I've come to realize just how significant that is. The light I feel can be overcome- modern lighting can simulate the sun- but the constant water intrusion will just drive you crazy.

Modern lighting cannot even vaguely simulate the sun.

If what you care about is the amount of light, and its temperature, then sure, modern lighting can get you lots of lumens of the appropriate color.

Sunlight constantly changes, in a way that connects the inside space to the outside world. There's no way to fake that.

Adjacent related:

This guy bought an underground rocket silo and is documenting the repair process: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd50A5qLv8FemVufSvDgkCQ

*I remember hearing about it on HN in a similar discussion some time ago and thought it might be relevant for some of the people in this thread.

Maybe the best middle ground is to build "Domes" style homes.

But i think brick + concrete is the best solution. Sturdy, repairable and not overly expensive.

If caves/underground bunkers or flying homes would be cheaper and more effective it would be tried already ;)

Never underestimate super old proven traditional solution. First check if your new solution cover all bases like old one used to :D

This blog post is 7+ years old, but they must keep updating it, which is nice to see they are still alive and kicking.

https://www.homeintheearth.com/2013/05/11/we-dont-like-our-u...

Why not just build a house with very thick stone outer walls? Seems like all the advantages and none of the disadvantages.

The article author didn't build the house, they bought it.

Somebody built that house because it was their dream project, and then sold it because it turned into a nightmare.

If you want a thick stone house, you will need to acquire and move the stone. The usual construction in the US is wood stick framing. It's so ubiquitous that even finding a contractor who will work with steel framing instead of wood is difficult. The material cost isn't awfully different, but the techniques are.

Finding a contractor to handle stone would require a much, much larger budget.

It's virtually impossible to water proof concrete, the water pressure is such that it'll force its way through the smallest pinhole/crack.

This could be fixed on the inside by stripping everything back and with tanking membrane draining down to a sump with a RAID 1 array of sump pumps.

I'm not sure of underground domes, but I always dream of living in an aboveground dome, like the ones here:

https://www.monolithic.org/domes

Could never talk the husband into it, though.

That was very interesting and informative read.

Actually that is my dream - to build an underground house. I'm very sensitive to external noise so I'm ready to bear with cons of underground structure.

It seems like it'd be much much easier to build above ground with adequate sound proofing or even just remoteness, neither of which are very expensive when contrasted with building underground.

Search for info on insulated concrete form. Really cool stuff, it's essentially styrofoam lego bricks that are filled with concrete. Tons of insulation, and with 6" of concrete in all the outer walls as long as the windows are high quality it does a shockingly good job for noise insulation. No need to deal with the other issues of an underground house if all you want is noise insulation.

It appears this house was built during the 80s. Have newer designs mitigated some of those challenges? e.g. better materials and lessons-learned about waterproofing, etc.

All of those problems would be covered by insurance were I live. Glad I don't have to buy a house with such little buyer protection.

I grew up in an underground house, and it was not a good experience at all. It’s effectively like your entire house is a basement.

I would never get this. what if it snows? you're blocked in for weeks. terrible idea and construct

And humidity. And light.

I have a traversing flat, and even then, the bathroom being a cul-de-sac, I regularly ensure its air gets renewed. In fact, my washing machine leaked, the wall smelled mold, I’ve had hard time getting rid of the smell. In a flat where I can make air circulate!

Then about underground. Before opening the article I wondered “How can they build under earth level and not have huge humidity problems?” Earth is surprisingly wet, and humidity hoovers around. Plus rooms are i cul-de-sac, only one opening. But again, I’m asthmatic due to mold in a house when I was a child, so I certainly have developed my senses to avoid places which may put me at risk.

Then about light. It’s always been obvious to avoid depression one must flood the spaces in light. In fact, when I watch 007 from 1970, I wonder how people didn’t get depressed with wooden and brown interiors, which are, by all other artistic and craftsmanship considerations, absolutely beautiful. It is perhaps the two first considerations for the house I’m trying to buy: Wide windows, away from streets so I can keep them open and keep the inside dry, and light.

But I see one upside for their choice: Environmentalism recommends roof gardens for temperature regulation without AC. If people give weight to an environment criteria, it is legitimate.

Images don't load. Or just me?

Same here, it worked after enabling js.

Isn't it a bad idea to use gas heating if you are worried about humidity?

Vented gas heating is fine. We use it and combustion gases (which do have a lot of water vapor in then) are vented outside via a chimney in our case but powered venting in other cases. (In our case, we take in outside air throughout the building but the humidity in the outside air in winter is low anyway. It is also possible to directly supply outside air for combustion and this is the most common arrangement for new installation [for temperature efficiency rather than humidity reasons].)

Unvented gas heating (think a construction "torpedo heater" or a camp stove) does dump a lot of humidity into the space of course.

> If we ever get rid of this albatross, would we ever again consider living in an underground house? Definitely.

Did the author even read the article they just read? Or do they want to write a follow-up piece on the disaster of the second underground home they bought 15 years from now?

Puzzling why they didn’t include inside pics with some of the damage.

> The safe, secure feeling during a storm.

Unless it causes a flood ...

Not surprisingly, underground house wasn't such a great idea, our predecessors learned this lesson when they abandoned caves, burrows and mud huts ages ago.

Wooden houses are a mistake. They burn. Unless... Unless you're good at making wooden houses that aren't likely to burn.

A failure isn't generally a proof that the main idea is wrong. Most failure are execution failures. I imagine that if they built this house again, they'de solve those problems.

In any case, the "ancestor" of mine that abandoned the mud hut he was born in was my grandfather, Tom... who (incidentally) was a builder. That specific style of mud hut (dob walls, thatched roof) is now making a comeback, with modern conveniences like floors. It's funny how a 20th century house, a hobbit hole and Denisova cave all fall into the same "ancestral" bucket.

> Wooden houses are a mistake

Every house in NZ is wooden. They work fine when built right, though we have built them with too little insulation for too long.

I think that's actually the parent's point. The quoted sentence is rhetorical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake

>The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake is the deadliest earthquake in recorded history. According to imperial records, approximately 830,000 people lost their lives.[4]

>It occurred on the morning of 23 January 1556 in Shaanxi, during the Ming dynasty. More than 97 counties in the provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Gansu, Hebei, Shandong, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu and Anhui were affected. Buildings were damaged slightly in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai.[5] An 840-kilometre-wide (520 mi) area was destroyed,[6] and in some counties as much as 60% of the population was killed.[7] Most of the population in the area at the time lived in yaodongs, artificial caves in loess cliffs; these collapsed in great numbers, causing many casualties.

I think this is one of the reasons that homes are usually of lighter wood construction in Japan, they tend not to collapse and smoosh their occupants. Big drawback is fire, obviously.

I'm confused, how does it get: "Lots of natural light" if it's underground?

The article clarifies this multiple times both in the primary article and the Q&A section.

There are large windows at the front and the back of the house, in the atrium and on the rear side exposed by the slope of the hill.

Still, there isn't a single picture from inside the house. A video showing how is it to live inside a hill etc..

This sounds more like a lack of experience than anything else. If they had found an experienced construction company that would have built these houses in the hundreds, that company would have assigned resources and figured out drainage, sealing and cracking. Once all this work is done, I'd assume it could be just as viable as anything else.

(And reading between the lines, the problems seem to be water, water, positioning on a sloped hill, cracks, water, water, quirkiness, water, and quirkiness.)

If anything, there's a bigger lesson in here on trusting things that are tried and trusted, instead of doing quirky stuff and trusting it with your livelihood. Why move in right away, why not have this as a weird cabin thing to experiment with? Never do experiments without fallbacks, people ...

Bear in mind that this wasn't a house that they constructed – it was purchased some years after construction from the previous owner.

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