By making the structure wider we’ve been able to rearrange some things and can actually put in a second bedroom on the main floor. This will also allow us to slide the washer and dryer over closer to our bedroom and to vent the dryer out beyond the master bathroom or to keep that moist warm air inside in the winter.

One other major change that we’ve made to the design is that we’re not going to berm the north wall (the top of the picture). To do so we’d need to use a large amount of concrete and insulation on that side of the building. It’ll be more cost effective and environmentally friendly to not berm and build a porch to meet the sidewalk. Then we can also build wattle fencing under the porch, add a door, and store things like gardening equipment under the porch. The porch and the greenhouse (for the back of the house) are not included in the above image but they are very much a part of the plan so don’t worry – we didn’t forget them!

Overall – aside from adjustments that an engineer or architect might make to ensure code compliance this is basically the design we want to go with!  There is room for us to have a kid (or two), room for office space in the loft, and the yard space will give us enough room to grow (with luck) 80% or more of our own food. I was even reading today about how to grow wheat and other grain crops in small spaces and am confident that we could be mostly self-sufficient in just a few years.

One minor change that we might make (to this design) is to do a combined sink/toilet that would look something like this:

This would save on space in the second bathroom and allow us to put a small closet in that bedroom. The water from the sink would be used to flush the toilet and any excess would flow down the toilet drain. The tank would be accessible from behind the sink but when not needed you could put all the stuff that women tend to fill a sink-top with right on top of it (just keep the lid closed if you plan to do so).

As always be sure to let us know what you think of the plans or if you’re interested in helping out and as always thanks for reading!

So the wife and I found the land we want to build on inside of the city of Pittsburgh and we’ve got an email into BBI asking what information they will need to give us a building permit and ultimately an occupancy permit. We’ve also got an email into the local community group. As the land is city owned (actually URA owned) we need their approval for our project. I know some people might find that to be a huge pain but I actually really like that – maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am a VP on the board of directors of a similar community group.

Learning to build cob

While we are waiting to hear back from BBI and to have our meeting with the community group we are not sitting on our hands. We’ve been reaching out to others in and around Pittsburgh who may have some interest in what we are doing as well as talking to people around the country who have already built cob houses to find out how they got their buildings to pass inspection or what tested they had to have conducted for a structural engineer or architect to sign off of the building.

Compressive Strength vs. Tensile Strength

One thing we found is that the straw that is required for tensile strength brings down the compressive strength so we’ve looked into different types of pozzolans (additives) and while fly ash is abundant and free in Western PA we are worried about it’s toxicity. The soil we are going to be using will already probably contain some amount of lead so we want to use the cleanest stuff available.

It seems like pumice is probably our best bet. While pumice is not going to be able to be locally sourced it will not only make the cob stronger but will also make it lighter allowing us to build faster. It also adds insulation (or R) value. It will increase our cost for the cob but will lower the cost on the plaster side as we won’t need a full 4 inches of plaster to increase the R value as much.

If you are interested in learning more or in helping us when the project gets underway use the contact form or leave a comment and thank you for your interest!

The more than we’ve researched the more information we’re finding out about cob that tells us that a cob home is not only the way to go for a few years but is in fact the way to go for good. One of the concerns is that concrete (which we’d need for our underground home) is made of Portland Cement. Portland Cement releases 1.5 tons of carbon for each ton of cement produced. That’s not cool.

While we plan to have modern electricity, gas (for cooking and to add some mechanical heating), we can’t bring ourselves to a point where we are OK with releasing that much carbon when half the reason we want to live underground is because we want to help the environment!

So we’ve found a bit of land in the city and we’ve researched how to buy it. Our next step is to talk with the local community group about getting their help with buying the land and we need to double check that we are up on our taxes and make sure that Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Building Inspection will sign off on us using cob. After that we’ll buy the land and start to do this:

If you’re interested in helping build our home we are interested in doing an exchange – we’ll help you build yours if you help us build ours! Contact me via the website to discuss.

Why build with cob?

Why do we want to build a permanent cob home? We believe (we’ll find out) that we can build a home out of cob that is roughly 1,600 sq feet for under 20k (including the cost of the land). This means we could do so without needing a mortgage. If we can do it so can you and so can the other folks in the community we are looking to build in. This will free us from the grip of the industrial builders and all the other things that come along with them (mainly mortgage costs but also high energy costs, the cost of repairs, the risk of fire and need for fire insurance, health costs associated with volatile chemicals inside of industrial products like treated lumber, as well as environmental costs).

Cob is build with the onsite ground (which is what makes it less expensive) so we’ll also want to do some soil testing but as long as it checks out we should be in our cob home within 3 years!!!

No worries – I’ve never been one to shy away from crashing an event that could benefit from my attendance so after checking yesterday to make sure it was still on – off I went in the 94 degree heat on my bicycle to learn how to make cob in the unforgiving summer sun.

Or not.

See when I got there 2 minutes late (is that fashionably late or still on time? I have a hard time knowing) I was alone. I was not even joined by crickets. Just me, the blistering summer sun, and an urban garden with some dudes in the alley behind said garden tossing horseshoes. I did think about asking the horseshoe fellas if they were there to learn about building things out of cob but they didn’t seem the type so I rode right past them heading for home.

On my way home I stopped in Espresso a Mano which is great little coffee shop in Lawrenceville about half-way between where I live and where I found disappointment in the face of Cob I checked the meetup group again and saw the event had been marked cancelled. Bummer. I wish they’d have cancelled earlier – like a few days ago maybe but I can’t get too upset since they didn’t know I was coming.

While I was really looking forward to the workshop the fact that it was cancelled has given rise to the idea that the Schmutz Company could maybe host a cob building workshop. I plan on running this past Dave to see what he thinks of the idea but seeing as how he was talking about building an oven for baking bread and pizzas and things I don’t know that I’ll need to twist his arm too much. If you’d be interested in attending leave a comment below or email me from the contact page and I’ll be sure to let you know what the plan is. Oh, and if we schedule and then cancel it we’ll let you know several days in advance.

For some great photos of what cob and other natural building materials look like check out the Natural Building Flickr group or just do a Google image search for cob – there are a ton of pictures of amazing things that are and can be built out of the stuff!

When it comes to owning my own place my wife and I have looked in the past and even went as far as putting a deposit down on a place a few years ago that didn’t pass inspection so for now we are still renting while we pay off our credit cards and save up a bit. Lots of things have stopped us from buying our own home it seemed that no matter where we’ve looked we’ve never found a place that really had everything we want. Where we’ve rented we’ve always had issues with noise, temperature changes, energy costs, allergens, and most recently hellish neighbors. These neighbors have gotten us thinking and talking about what we want in a house.

Underground & In-ground Homes

While talking about these things I stumbled upon a few really cool designs like this “Hobbit House” in Wales and this Swiss Mountain getaway. Both of them are greener than the average house because they are either earth bermed or are built mostly underground. This lowers energy costs, cuts down on noise, and has loads of other benefits like lower risk of damage from natural disasters and lower allergy issues. There are a few different ways to build underground and while we’d love to do so in as cheap and as low impact as we can we recognize the need to offset costs enough to make it affordable and we’re in favor of longevity which means building with concrete and not wood. If we do use wood we plan to use as little chemically treated lumber as it’s treated with toxins such as arsenic.

We’ve found a few places that do monolithic poured concrete homes – that is reinforced concrete shells that are pored once, not pieced together with joints that could leak or that are not set at different times. With that in mind we’ve began planning and looking for possible places to build. We’d love to stay in the city of Pittsburgh but we also want to find a south-facing hillside that we can build into. I won’t say where we’ve found for fear that someone else will buy it in the mean time but I will share some of our design ideas with you.

Passive Solar

We want to find a south-facing hillside because we want to maximize the sunlight that will strike the face of the house that is not in ground. Our design calls for 3 sides and the top being underground as you can see from the picture on the left (click on the picture for a larger view).

The design calls for the house to sit back from the road (at the end of an alleyway in this design) will house a two-car garage, will have space for 3 bedrooms and will have a terraced lawns on the top of the house and behind (though also above). These lawns will not just be wasted on grass. Though not pictured here there will be vertical containers for gardening. The area behind the house will be higher than the area on the top by 5 to 6 feet and will be even with the sidewalk on the street behind it. This area will house trees that root deep and not wide. We’d like to use fruit or nut trees if possible but that will depend on the root system of the tree. To the east of the house we’ll only have 3 1/2 to 6 feet of space. 3 feet of it will be taken up with an exterior staircase that will lead to the terraces and will be gated to the sidewalk above. The space we’re looking at would be about 50 feet deep and 100 feet along the front.

As you can see in the photo there is another staircase near our property. If you’re familiar with Pittsburgh you know that these are actually considered streets and they were built for the mill workers to travel between the mills along the river and their homes at the top of or along the hills. These staircases often cover ground that is too steep to build a road on so we most likely couldn’t build a driveway down from the main street to the alley that we are looking to front the property along. That’s fine with us as it will allow us to live in the city but have some seclusion.

Planning to live underground

The people that we’ve talked to about our idea don’t always “get it”. My business partner Dave keeps talking about my wish to live in a hobbit house but honestly if you look at the example of the “hobbit house”above you’ll see that my design and our goals are very different. While we hope to build a house that will not scar the land as badly as a traditional home can we simply can’t build a cob house or earthen walled home that will have any real longevity. Plus Pittsburgh is termite and carpenter bee territory whereas Wales is termite free so you can build with untreated woods there. Here there would be stability issues and we’d need to rebuild in 10-20 years when we were in our 50s. While building a house ourselves in our 30s sounds fun it might not be so much fun when we’re 20 years older.

The hobbit house also doesn’t have much of an earth-covered roof. It’s a living roof but it’s only thinly covered. While the roof design is reciprocal and very low-impact we’d rather have a monolithic poured concrete shell which will not only keep out water and be resistant to insects and other pests but will also last hundreds of years (if not longer).

What do you think?

Would you like to live underground and save 70-80% of energy costs? Would you like to have more outdoor space (on the top of your home)? Would you like to live in the city but have much less noise? Would you like to live in the city and green it at the same time? Reducing the carbon foot-print of you, your home, your neighborhood, and your city?

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Check back in the future for more info and to keep an eye on our progress. If you’d like to see us progress faster by donating to our project please use the contact form to ask how!

I’ve ran special offers on my Facebook page for some time and I’ve received very good response to them from my Facebook fans but I wanted to make sure that anyone who comes to the website is aware that they can find those specials and take advantage of them by becoming fans of WDO Photography on Facebook. I won’t tell you what those deals are here – you’ve got to become a fan on Facebook to take advantage of them anyhow but recently we’ve offered deals for everything from portrait packages to special event photography discounts that can be applied to wedding packages as well as corporate events or even family reunions. Check out what we have posted now and check back regularly for new offers.

Click here to become a fan and to take advantage of the Facebook only special offers.

Every month I run reports from Google Analytics and several other sources to see how my websites are doing. Knowing how many hits your website has gotten is important but how do you know how many hits your website could have potentially had?

Keyword Analysis: Pittsburgh photographer

The first step to finding the answer to that question is knowing what keyword(s) you’re trying to use to bring people to your site. For me the keywords Pittsburgh photographer and event photography are very important. Google sent me 116 visitors last month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. I know that from looking at my Google Analytics but how do I know how many I could have gotten? For that I need to check Google’s search-based keyword tool. On average there are 200 local searches per month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. So that means that last month I received 116 visits out of (an average) of 200 possible visits. That’s 58% of the possible visits. What does this mean though?

It means that not only is my website web positioned for this keyword (in that it shows up in search results) but also that when it comes to searches for Pittsburgh photographers my website receives visits from over 1/2 of the people searching for photographers in Pittsburgh.

The lesson is as follows – knowing how many hits you’re getting is great but knowing those numbers compared to the potential number of hits gives you a better picture. Why spend money on expensive SEO services if you don’t know how many possible hits they can generate? Budgets are tight, don’t spend hundreds of dollars a month chasing after low numbers. Use Google’s search based keyword tool to find keywords that both relate to your business and that generate a fair amount of searches each month. Use these keywords on your website, in your content and in meta tags. Write blog posts about those keywords – like I’m doing here with the keywords Pittsburgh photographer. If you do these things you can manage your own SEO and keep the money you may otherwise be wasting paying an SEO company.

http://ihobbycorner.com/professional-photography/

Which will almost certainly need to be removed from that website. If it is before you get a chance to read it let me tell you what it is. It’s an advertisement for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (AIP) disguised as a blog post on a hobby blog. The reason that I know if will be removed soon is because it’s illegal. Laws were past last year that made it illegal for bloggers and twitterers to endorse things without reveling their relationship or any compensation they are getting for doing so. This wasn’t even that well disguised – it looked like copy taken right from their website or from print material.

AIP is where I graduated from in 2001 and I really do value what I learned there but most of the people I graduated with are not doing what they went to school there for and we were told a ton of mis-truths and on occasion outright lies by the representatives of  the school. Things have only gotten worse as these days they are owned by Goldman Sachs who have pushed even harder for ever higher profits.

Upon reading this blog post advertisement I couldn’t pass up the chance to share with potential readers the lies and misrepresentations that abound with these folks. Being that my comment needed to be moderated and the fact that the post should be taken down I’ve decided to share my comments here with you dear reader so enjoy:

WDOphoto Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:17 pm

This poster is almost certainly a sales person – a paid sales person and their post may be in violation of recent laws that require a blogger to identify anyone who might be paying them to blog about a particular subject or any relationship that they might have with the subject that they are blogging about.

What the author also fails to tell you is that many graduates also are crushed by the huge expense of the tuition that the Art Institute charges.

I graduated from AIP in 2001, out of the folks that graduated with me and before and after me by a few quarters I am one of maybe 10 people that are working as a photographer.

Forget getting a job as a photojournalist right out of AIP – the newspaper industry has been shedding jobs, not adding them, and the vast majority of the students they pass through are not focused or driven enough to work in such a competitive field.

Nor are they set to work in commercial photography which is just as competitive. The majority of the students who are herded through their programs like cattle are meek and mild and set-up to fail.

This poster fails to tell you dear reader that you can learn just as much at a state school, more even, than what you will at AIP for far less money.

They’ve also failed to tell you that since Goldman Sachs bought EDMC (the company which owns AIP that the poster almost certainly works for in a sprawling cubical filled warehouse in Pittsburgh’s Strip District) the focus has become far more financially driven and profit motivated and far less about education.

Don’t get me wrong – the school was always profit driven. It’s just that now they are even more ruthless in their pursuit of financial gains at the expense of the general public.

EDMC employs hundreds, if not thousands, of sales people. They are not “councilors” they are sales people, their backgrounds are in sales, they don’t care if you are mentally deficient – if you have the money they’ll tell you how wonderful your future is going to be. After all the schools they are pushing have a 100% acceptance rate.

I strongly encourage everyone to read about the high costs of these schools and how these schools have a higher percentage of students who default on their loans as was my case because the cost of AIP was so high that I was forced into taking out private loans. They at one time set up (and still might have) a private loan just for them through Sallie Mae that I was told was the only private loan I was allowed to apply to my bill there. When I took out this loan the interest rate was 23% (compound that).

Something else to keep in mind – these schools target lower income high-school students and working adults that more than likely come from a family or background where they in no way can understand the complex financial problems that are being thrust upon them.

I was a wide-eyed teenager herded into a tight hallway full of 6×6 rooms with a waiting line an hour to two long. My mother and I had little to no time to read anything that was shoveled at us. We were told to sign here and sign there – it was as if the devil himself, with all of his slickness, was on the other side of that desk. We got taken. And so did nearly everyone I waited in line with that day. As I said only a few of us made it out doing what we went in there for.

They told my mother that for me to get additional aid she’d need to apply and be turned down for parent plus loans. The problem was that she wasn’t turned down and there was no way, according to them, that she could NOT take the loan out. She was forced into taking on debt that she could in no way afford.

A popular misconception is that this is an “art school”. It’s not – it’s a trade school. They crank out students every 3 months with the same degree, many with no chance of doing what they have been, for-the-most-part, poorly trained to do.

I don’t mean to come down hard on the instructors because for the most part they are quality folks and I really do respect the vast majority of them but at the same time they are trapped in a hard spot.

It has become obvious to me from what I saw when I was there, when I’ve gone back to speak with portfolio students, and when I interact with graduates, (usually when they are serving me at a coffee shop), that the teachers are encouraged to do as much as they can to NOT fail students. How can one teach people when they are not allowed to weed out the poorly performing students?

Don’t waste your money on these people or believe anything their sales people tell you. If you don’t believe me I encourage you to look at the statistics or even read what is happening in the news right now where these for-profit school owners are fighting the dept of education to keep from being held accountable.

The Obama admin wants to tie their ability to get fin. aid (which is where most of their money comes from) to the ability of their students to pay that money back. Meaning that their higher level of defaults could put them at risk of loosing their source of income. They are fighting this as hard as they can because they don’t want to be held accountable for their failure to actually educate and train students.

Shame on you cstein for posting misleading advertisements in such a manipulative manner.

That’s the end of the post but for more info on how they are fighting the dept. of education see the following articles:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9DGTFCO0.htm

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100128-715543.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

I received both a phone call and an email today from such a company. When I googled them I found this page which is a complaint board for questionable businesses. In the event that you don’t want to click on it I’ve posted my comments that I left on the page at the bottom of this post.

They were not the worst that I’ve dealt with – by far. This summer I received a call from a dude that told me his company would fill the first results page of Google with my website and only my listings whenever anyone searched for photography and Pittsburgh. He had me search for a tanning salon in California that he said they did so for. So basically I pay them an arm and a leg and they eliminate any competition in the photography field from the first few pages of Google.

I explained to him that the photo community is fraternal. We may compete for customers and there may be a plethora of shooters in Pittsburgh but I could call up about 200 of my fellow photographers here in Pittsburgh and ask them to borrow a lens or a flash and they’d gladly let me borrow it even if I had beat that person out for the job.

After realizing that I was not going to go for his pitch he began to threaten me. If I wasn’t going to pay for it he’d find someone else who will and that means that I’ll never find another job to shoot ever again (never mind the fact that less than 10% of my leads, and maybe 2% of my clients come from people finding me via a search engine). Could I do better SEO? Probably. Should I? Maybe. Am I going to pay someone else to do it? NO. I know enough that I can do so myself. The fact that I’ve written Pittsburgh and photography so many times in this post alone may lead to me jumping up a few pegs in the search results. In the end though – I find most of my work via word-of-mouth and that’s something that few people can do FOR you, if you’re not going to do it yourself as well.

As far as generating leads for me – these companies also don’t seem to do much “active lead generating” they set up a website and use what? That’s right SEO to get to the top of results and list a ton of companies. They then charge you when someone clicks on you.

The last time I checked Google Adwords start at $0.01 per click. These other companies want to charge you $10 for a service that is not anywhere near as good because they only list you on their own site(s) – and not on all the pages that Google can list you on.

This isn’t even my biggest complaint about them. I’m about to tell you what my biggest complaint is about them.

My biggest complaint is that they are offering a service that YOU DON’T NEED! If you can’t find leads yourself you’re not going to stay in business. This is fundamental to your business – if you can’t find people to pay for what you’re selling your not going to last long so don’t trust finding leads to just anyone.

The other thing that really bothers me – besides the fact that these are worthless companies is that they offer very low wage jobs to people who just need a paycheck. These people don’t care about your business – they care about making enough to buy another pack of smokes, put gas in their car, and pay their cell phone bill. If you go out of business they won’t care one bit. Are those the people you want working to generate sales for you?

That’s enough bitching – I’ve got to go out and find people that want what I’m selling which I happen to be fairly good at.

Here was my comment: