Modular Lake Home with a Rustic Cabin Look
How many of you out there are considering building a prefab house with the traditional style of looks? I mean, there are a lot of modular house plans out there that, when finished, look a lot like traditionally constructed homes. Like this one, a modular lake home with a rustic cabin look put out as a building plan by Excelsior Homes.
They call it the Cedar Ridge, and its a 2 bedroom house (with one bathroom), which has in total over 1,000 square feet. It also has the appearance of a fairly sizable house, if its set up the way they have it in the picture above.
Unlike a lot of the modern-style prefab houses we often feature here, this plan doesn’t have glass around every wall. There are large picture windows in the kitchen, dining and living areas, and there’s that big deck on the one side (this is an add-on, which they expect is something that would be built on-site, not part of the prefab plan).
With the elevation of those large windows and the porch, you might see why the company markets this particular modular house design as a lakefront house. They call it the “Cedar Ridge” plan.
Like many modular and prefab homes, this design can be customized to a certain degree. There are options for the materials used to build the prefab, as well as upgrades. You can select the flooring, cabinets, countertops, exterior finishes, and the backsplash, too.
Other options center around heating, such as whether to have a fireplace put in, or a dishwasher. For more information on Excelsior and their prefab home plans and sales, find them in our directory (click here).
OK GO dropped a new YouTube song, and it all happens in 4 seconds
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From the album Hungry Ghosts, out now everywhere: http://smarturl.it/Hungry-Ghosts
The original members formed as OK Go in 1998, and their video for “Here It Goes Again” won a Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2007.
OK Go has earned considerable fame for the band’s creative and often low-budget music videos, most of which have been promoted through Internet video sharing sites like YouTube. Many of these have become viral videos; the 2006 video for “Here It Goes Again”, in which the band performed a complex routine with the aid of motorized treadmills, has received over 50 million views on YouTube four years later. The band’s video for Needing/Getting, released February 5, 2012 in partnership with Chevrolet, debuted during Super Bowl XLVI and has over 32 million views on YouTube.
Samuel Bayer, who produced many music videos in the 1990s, asserted that OK Go’s promotion of music videos on the Internet was akin to Nirvana’s ushering in the grunge movement. Many of the videos also use long or single-shot takes, which Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz claims “restore[s] a sense of wonder to the musical number by letting the performers’ humanity shine through and allowing them to do their thing with a minimum of filmmaking interference”. The success of OK Go’s music first won the band the 14th Annual Webby Special Achievement Award for Film and Video Artist of the Year.
The video for “This Too Shall Pass” was named both “Video of the Year” and “Best Rock Video” at the 3rd annual UK Music Video Awards. “This Too Shall Pass” won the LA Film Fest’s Audience Award for Best Music Video, UK MVA Awards – Music Video of the Year Winner 2010, among others.
The band has worked with directors including Francis Lawrence, Olivier Gondry (brother of Michel Gondry), Brian L. Perkins, Scott Keiner, and Todd Sullivan. The videos have been screened and displayed at museums, art galleries, and film festivals around the world including the Guggenheim Museum,[86] the Museum of the Moving Image, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and the Saatchi & Saatchi New Director’s Showcase.
In 2008, Damian Kulash said that the band had not produced the music videos as part of any overt “Machiavellian” marketing campaign. “In neither case did we think, ‘A-ha, this will get people to buy our records.’ It has always been our position that the reason you wind up in a rock band is you want to make stuff. You want to do creative things for a living.” On the release of the band’s video for “The Writing’s on the Wall” in 2014, Kulash explained to Rolling Stone that the band continues to make such quirky videos as following their success after “Here It Goes Again”, the band worried about being considered a one-hit wonder: “We could go in two directions: We could either try to out-cool it – try to out-run it like Radiohead did with ‘Creep’ – or just embrace it and go, OK, what really worked here.”
This portable river turbine can power your house by generating 12 kWh daily
This small river turbine can power a lot of your house needs. It’s called the Idénergie river turbine.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2015, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,812 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 901 kWh per month. Louisiana had the highest annual electricity consumption at 15,435 kWh per residential customer, and Hawaii had the lowest at 6,166 kWh per residential customer.
That means that with one of these little water turbines (or something similar), a house could meet a large percentage of its daily energy needs … rain or shine.
“We estimate that 1.4 billion individuals across the world are without electricity, most living in rural and distant areas inaccessible to the national or regional electricity grid. The most common energy solution available is the use of gas generators which are polluting and can be expensive to maintain in the long term. As an alternative, the use of green technologies is rapidly growing.
“Renewable energy solutions are gaining popularity especially in the residential market. Billions of dollars are invested every year on solar and wind systems. However these renewable energy products do not represent optimal solutions for meeting individual needs due to intermittent production of energy resulting in weather variations. In consequence, these systems are only used to 12% to 35% of their capacity implicating an over sizing of installations and storage systems to accumulate the energy when produced. However one regular and predictable energy source is unexploited: the river.”
“Our turbine can be dismantled in separate pieces in order to facilitate shipping to the the most remote locations and is ready to assemble on site. This allows for a simple and fast installation which requires only 2 individuals in less than a 24 hour period. The turbine is attached to a stable pillar from the front with a steel cable and is deposited on the river bed, self positioning in the fluid like a kite. Electrical DC connections are simplified by the presence of our embedded electrical converter. All that’s left to do is connect the output cable to your batteries, without any additional electric equipment.”
For more about Indergie’s project, visit their website.
Take a Look Inside – What Kind of Prefab Home is This?
When it comes to prefab homes, and steel prefab structures more specifically, many people consider a single piece, continuous roof that resembles a half-barrel. You might be familiar with the way these parts are repurposed from industrial usages, but that’s not the only reason modular and prefab house builders are using them.
A benefit of the arch is that they are stable. They’re self-supporting. When they’re used as the covering for a dwelling, they eliminate or reduce the need for interior roof supports. In the case of the prefab home pictured above, no interior supports are needed. They used a Galvalume sheet for this prefab, which is a carbon steel – aluminum – zinc composite material.
It kind of reminds me of A-frame construction in this way. And like some A-frames, this prefab half-barrel has completely glazed sides (without even support beams).
The house in the picture was designed by Brazilian Atelier Marko Brajovic, and he refers to it as “Arca.” It’s set in the Costa Verde Rainforest.
the floor is also elevated, allowing cool air to pass below the floor. They use concrete pier footings for this. Another technology used to cool this prefab building: wind-powered turbines on the roof which drive hot air out of the interior.
The house has two beds, a kitchen, and a bathroom.
Because it was made prefab, this house took only a week to assemble on the site, with reduced disturbance to the site. It can also easily be moved again. To see more of Atelier Marko Brajovic’s work, see our directory of prefab home designers and builders.
For more information on My Natural Pool, find them in the builder’s directory of Building Homes and Living.
To Build a New Natural Pool
A swimming pool is something a lot of people want to add to their house. Exercise, the pleasure of being in water, the social aspect of gathering around a pool, a type of fun that can be enjoyed by the whole family or with friends are among the benefits of building a backyard swimming pool. You can also go for a swim first thing in the morning as a way to start your day, cool off in the afternoon, or calm down in the evening with a swimming pool.
A lot of people don’t want a bunch of chlorine or other sanitary chemicals on their bodies every day, though. One option for swimming pools without the chemicals is the “natural pool.”
A “natural swimming pool” (sometimes called a “natural swimming pond”) is a pool that doesn’t use chemicals to disinfect or sterilize the water. Instead, the pool uses biological filters and / or plants that grow in the water.
For example, what can clean a pool without chemicals? UV rays, ozone, copper / silver ions.
Natural swimming pools can be built from scratch, or can be modified from existing chemically-cleaned pools.
We found My Natural Pool, which provides information on natural swimming pools, as well as selling pdf ebooks on the subject (including swimming pool plans) for around $75.00 for a natural filtration system guide and $30 for a making-a-natural-pool guide (click here to visit them). They also deal with Aqua Diamante, which is a chlorine free and pH-independent broadband sanitizer for pools, another option for a chemical-free natural swimming pool for people’s back yards.
For more information on My Natural Pools, find them in the directory of home builders at Building Homes and Living.
This Is The Biggest Toy Hauler I’ve Ever Seen
Wow. Take a look at that luxury fifth wheel trailer up there. I always thought this picture was shopped until now.
Just found out more about this fifth wheel! It’s not photoshopped. It’s one of two very large 5th wheel toy haulers Weekend Warrior built that were this big. Toterhome toy hauler luxury.
Many people out there use fifth wheel trailers, and there’s lots of interest in the RV community in big ones with lots of features and amenities, but what is the limit?
The owner of one of the toy haulers was the owner of the company, and CEO, from what I have read. I mean the owner-and-CEO of Weekend Warrior fifth wheels (and I think they do motor homes as well).
For the owner I guess it makes sense to have such a big toterhome trailer — a bit of marketing probably doesn’t hurt.
Take a look at some of the notable features of this fifth wheel trailer: the number of tires, for starters. Those look like dualies, too. Then there’s the graphics, which go over the windows as well. And you can see two AC units in that photo. And a slide out patio.
So my question for you guys is how big a truck would you want to feel comfortable towing a fifth wheel like this? Also, I know this is an old trailer build and I’ve really seen a lot of care and attention put into these old ones, maybe because they lend themselves more to personality than the newer ones?
Weekend Warrior are just one of many travel trailer / toterhome manufacturers, but a Toter, or “Mobile Home Toter” is a tractor unit specifically designed for the modular and manufactured housing industries. Some toters are highly adapted for purposes of delivering or removing mobile homes on smaller home sites. Others look and operate similar to over-the-road semi-trailer tractors with longer wheelbases and sleeper cabs.
The toter is often confused or mistaken for a semi-trailer tractor. The key difference between the two is in the method of coupling. Toters are equipped with a 2-5/16″ (59 mm) diameter ball that couples with the tow hitch on the tongue of a mobile or manufactured home or the removable transport frame of a modular home. Semi-trailer tractors have fifth wheel couplings designed to couple to a semi-trailer.
Some Toters are hybrids, with both a fifth wheel and a ball hitch. The ball and hitch is a more fitting design for the height demands of the housing industry considering that the homes must still be transported down public roads with overhead cables and overpasses.
But this is maybe a few steps beyond your normal toterhome even. How many normal people would tow something this huge? For more information about Weekend Warrior trailers, find them in the vehicle directory. Here’s the big one as well as some other close contenders.
