You might be surprised to find that what these two pictures have in common is that both the table and this wall are made of shipping pallets.

In many places, rough wooden pallets are free at hardware stores, making recycling them into furniture or a building material a great way to be frugal and green.

Of course, for the best results, you need to sand the rather rough wood down to get this smooth finish! But the wood used in pallets is not inherently rough and nasty – it sands down just like other wood.

Quirky design such as exhibited here in these silly chairs are one option.

Or you can make pallets elegant and honed to perfection, like this storage chest made by a new mom.

You can celebrate the rough and ready design aesthetic of the shipping pallet with kitchen shelves that quickly serve a purpose with minimal intervention.

For the frugal entertainer, shipping pallet furniture will quickly set up a cosy conversation center.

You can make a sophisticated style statement in a minimal bedroom with a dark stain for a very stylish headboard.

Attaching wheels makes a moveable coffee table, that works by contrasting a sleek glass top on the rough pallet.

A shot of color on a stack of pallets celebrates the mismatched wood of the shipping pallet.

An antique stain and meticulous sanding that further emphasizes the individual and wonky look of the poorly constructed pallet creates a super rustic kitchen cabinet.

Or the addition of wonderfully strange wheels make for an amusing rolling cart. All of these great photos were captured by DIY Diva and Reclaimed Home and Learning as I Go.

This is a post from Home Design Find

11 Great Uses for Recycled Shipping Pallets

Tumbleweed’s newest tiny movable house is completely different from their traditional wooden gnome’s cottages on wheels – that might be embarrassing to actually drive around towing – and you can build one for $20,000 from their plans.

From the outside, the Popomo, with its rolled hot steel siding is a quite anonymous looking industrial box, making it possible to try to find a gorgeous private place to set up camp without arousing attention.

Tiny houses can be illegal so Tumbleweed designs them to go on a 24′ flat bed trailer, and stay on it: a supposedly mobile home. If it is on wheels, it is not “a building” but a vehicle, and thus not subject to building codes.

In their newest, the tiny house actually almost competes with the RV, exactly the right size for being actually mobile – and is designed to actually go places and enjoy them once set up, while maintaining anonymity till you get there, with its anonymous industrial exterior.

Unlike most RVs or caravan campers, it is not beset by curves that cut into storage space.

For one thing, every square inch allowed on the road without a special permit gets used: it measures the full allowable 8′ 6″ wide. At about 7,500 lbs, any full size truck can tow it, and at 24′ long including the hitch, it maximizes the allowable size.

The tiniest kitchen occupies one end with a two-burner stove, an under-counter refrigerator, a bar sink, an RV on-demand hot water heater, and under the corner blind spot, a propane boat heater.

All of their houses on wheels are wired for electricity and ready to be plugged in through a plug on the outside, and plumbed to be connected to public water with RV hoses.

Like on many boats, the bathroom becomes the shower … and it is called a “wet bath”. Using water proof truck liner paint, the walls of the bathroom are sealed tight, allowing for a quick shower. There are no pictures of how the toilet looks when it’s in the shower, but it would seem that a fold down shelf over it for when the bathroom is used as a shower would make combining the two a less weird, if extremely innovative, use of very scarce space that after all, is not in constant use.

Water enters via an RV white hose and leaves via an RV sewer valve. A sewer hose would connect the house to the sewer, and the plans include options for a standard, compost, or RV-type toilet.

A tiny but livable camper.

Tumbleweed is known for their traditional-style tiny, tiny, tiny wooden cottages, and starting to get a lot of business in this second great depression, as their tiny little houses can actually be built quite cheaply by a do-it-yourselfer from between $20,000 and $50,000.

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Anonymous Metal Trailer is Secret Hideout

The simple slot towards the back of the table, together with the shelf, manage to be both extremely flexible, and very effective in reducing clutter. And the widened holes at the sides at the bottom of the slot allow for whatever computer designers will come up with next.

As he says: “I’m no big fan of the corner cable holes in many commercial office desks (an unrelenting blight). A tabletop-length slot is a striking feature but it provides much more direct and flexible cable throughput.”

It is a simple, almost classic design, and it solves a real problem.

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Angry Blogger Designs Better Computer Desk

The view out remains the same, unfortunately. But now you have a highly functional industrial chic kitchen in the heart of town!

A full office with perfect feng shui and a long view out.

A cozy spot to watch TV after the front is closed up at night. Storage is stacked above and behind the seating area.

Upstairs, in a loft above the seating, a place for peaceful slumber.

And somewhere, the bathroom is squeezed in too. The entire living space is just 41 sq meters, nothing lavish. But hip.

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A Chic Garage Conversion

Unlikely plastic objects like these abound, if we just keep an eye out for shapes that can hold a little dirt for our tiny lawn.

This example of the undaunted spontaneous energy of weeds pushing through bricks gives you the strength to keep trying when nothing seems to be going right. Get the ‘Weeds’ planter by Arwin Calouj or make your own using a few old reclaimed bricks.

Here are some planters that range from the expensive to the staggeringly expensive, from Urban Nature.

But some of these could surely be duplicated for very, very much less, with a little elbow grease.

Simple, elegant cube-shaped planters like these from Stone Forest are easily made. You can buy 5 slate, or limestone, or travertine tiles for about a dollar or two each, and glue them together into cube planter boxes. These are about $140.

These gorgeous Obleeek planters are available through  Urban Nature for as much as $1,000.

But a smaller much cheaper version could be recreated using plaster of Paris or concrete mix.
You need one large and one small plastic bowl, and a little plastic bottle cap to be the mold for a drainage hole at the bottom of your planter.

One big bowl: the size you want to make the outside, and the small bowl: the size that you want to make the scooped out hole for the plant itself. Place the little bowl on top of the bottle cap inside the big bowl, hold the interior bowl down on top of the bottle cap, and pour your concrete/plaster of Paris mix in around it to fill the big bowl. Wait…

The bottle cap is making the drainage hole in the bottom, by blocking the concrete from filling the space. The smaller bowl inside is blocking the concrete from filling the big bowl, creating the scooped out hole for plants.

When the concrete or plaster of Paris sets, pull the little plastic bowl and the plastic bottle cap out and dump out the concrete mold by pulling away the big bowl, et voila!

Or perhaps not. Oops. Well, you can always buy direct from the designer Obleeek for much less than from Urban Nature.

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Make Your Own Do-it-Yourself Planter Boxes

Hemp is mixed with just quicklime and water on-site and then packed into molds between the structural timbers.

Although he named it hemcrete, the mix is non-structural: more like straw bale than concrete.However, as you see here, the walls are not as thick as typical straw bale walls. The temperature-regulating properties are equivalent, due to the high thermal mass.

Brenner claims that the material has the ability to absorb carbon, not just when grown but even during its second life: being mixed into a wall, because there is more carbon sequestered in the growing of hemp than in the making of the mixture with lime on site.

Purepanel recycled paper panels from Paragon Panels provide the insulation inside, using air-filled cardboard.

Despite the beautiful interior appointments, the house was quite economical to build.

The cost is partly due to the very large footprint. Tt 3,400 sq ft, the building’s cost-per-square-foot priced-out very economically – at just $133 per sq ft.

Via Inhabitat

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Hemp Makes a Lovely Design/Build Home

But rather than spend thousands to fix the pool, the two young homeowners who bought the home decided to transform the abandoned pool into something useful. A Garden Pool.

Disturbed by the wastefulness of swimming pool culture; the energy wasted on running pool pumps, and the prospect of losing 7,000 gallons of water a year to evaporation in a state that is well into the drought future that awaits most of the Southwest, Dennis built a greenhouse over the pool.

Inside the greenhouse, he raises Tilapia fish in the bottom of the old pool (that doesn’t look very sanitary… ) and in the middle he grows fruits and vegetables hydroponically, and on top, he raises chickens.

The temperature in the covered pool is 10-15 degrees cooler than outside with the help of a large evaporative cooler and shade cloths.

People have had chickens and grown food before, but raising your own Tilapia fish alone is a novel idea for most of us, an idea that more of us should consider.

Dennis says that Tilapia mature from egg to harvest size of one and a half pounds in about 7 months, and at maturity a single female can have more than a thousand babies every 4-6 weeks.

The chickens can walk across the wire mesh that covers the whole thing. The fertilizer is all recycled within the food chain, supposedly.

This conversion won’t win any design awards, but there’s more to design than aesthetics! Dennis claims that it feeds his family of four with 8 fresh eggs a day, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and all the fish they can eat.

He claims that it doesn’t smell, has passed muster with local inspection officials, and he runs a tour so that you can see if it would work for your abandoned foreclosed swimming pool too. It’s too far for me to visit it, but if you can drop by this unique Mesa, Arizona location, let me know what you thought!

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Turn Your Foreclosed Swimming Pool into a Permaculture Fish Farm

It is rare that a roof seems made for solar, like this one.

More often, a person winds up in a home that just does not have a solar-friendly roof. It’s too small, or it’s too steep, or it faces the wrong way, or it’s too riddled with little gables and dorm windows and turrets and whatnot. It’s not wrong to have a busy roof. It’s just wrong for solar.

But that is no reason to simply give up on generating your own power. You have more room for solar than you think.

Don’t just think of only your roof when you think of where to put your solar. Think of all the airspace over all of your land as potential solar-generating airspace.

Almost everybody has some empty air over where the car gets parked. Many times you can attach a structure to hold your solar panels over where you park.

Perhaps there’s a lawn that could use a shading device like a pergola.

The design options are limitless.

How about around behind a pool? It’s nice to have some shade back there, anyway. Why not put that roof to work?

Lots of houses really need awnings over Southwest windows that are too blaring now. And facing Southwest is the perfect spot for making some solar juice. But solar panels work much more efficiently when connected, than separated like this. But this is a start at thinking of dual-use solar panels.

Adding a solar awning can simply shade an entry as this one does. It’s important to design it so it works well with your house. This is a nice way to hold the panels themselves but the design needs to be integrated into the structure better. (Or perhaps it’s just that railing and walkway that needs to be revamped!)

Here’s a much more well-integrated design. Imagine this with bi-facial solar panels, the see-through kind on glass. A solar roof can create a porch space between two parts of the house. Almost every home looks better with some kind of outdoor room. A porch or veranda. Why not design one to add solar to some of that wasted airspace around your no-good-for-solar roof.

A new solar porch can be built in any style. What better excuse for a porch than to start making up for all that nasty power that you use inside, by making your own nice clean future-friendly power yourself on a beautiful new veranda roof.

It’s just being responsible, after all!

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When You Don’t Have Room on Your Roof for Solar Panels

It is the bookcase concealing the bed that does all the moving (with your help).

All told, a bedroom, a dressing and a working area are all slotted into the same space in such a way that when the room is being used for any one purpose, it would feel as if you have access to the full space, making it less claustrophobic than if it was permanently partitioned.

Behind the head of the bed is this dressing room. The mirror on the headboard of the bed is a two way, giving the illusion of more space, both in the dressing “room” and also, on the other side.

At the foot of the double bed, a work area is revealed when the bookcase is slid back to conceal the dressing room behind the bed. The mirrored headboard also adds to the space. When working at the table at the foot of the bed your reflected self at work at the reflected desk would appear to be about 20 feet away, giving a sense of spaciousness.

Built-in to the the sliding system at the wall is a red glossy wall unit above the work area, to contain work documents, and the bottom compartment folds down to make a desk. (I’m not wild about the strange angled-curve design of the edge of this storage compartment, but that’s just me).

Source: Mocoloco

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Sliding Bookcase makes 3 Rooms From 1

…but these are the first straw bale building blocks I’ve seen. What a simple, but great idea. Straw bale construction is eco friendly. Straw is a waste product on farms. And sourcing your building materials from what would otherwise go to waste makes for very sustainable buildings.

Here’s how it works. Oryzatech has found a way to compress rice straw into interlocking blocks of super fire-resistant straw. The holes act both as stabilizer connectors, just like lego blocks, but also provide the conduit through which threaded rods run to bolt the walls to the foundations, and to allow vertical runs for electrical, plumbing and cable conduits.

Through a scalable, low energy-production process, the company can make and sell an almost unlimited supply of highly insulating, carbon-sequestering construction blocks.

The insulating value of straw is unparalleled. The resulting structure creates (Passive-haus level) R-50 insulating walls, that provide better shear strength than a traditional sheathed 2×4 wall.  Each block weighs about 30 pounds, and is easily clean cut with a saw. California Polytechnic University has tested the blocks and found that they are:

• Highly insulated: More than three times the value of an insulated 2X6 stud wall
• Seismically strong: better than wood framing and less brittle than concrete walls
• Fast to assemble: Block dimensions are 12”x12”x24”, easily dovetailing with other common construction modules. Each block weighs only 30 lbs and interlocks.
• Carbon Offsetting Technology- University testing shows potentially 50 lbs of carbon offsetting

With all these positives, there is just one negative. No horizontal conduit runs are possible so far. The vertical hole is available in every block, so the fact that these are not available with conduit holes that also enable horizontally run conduit matters somewhat less; however, this is one thing the duo are working on finding the resolution for, because obviously it is still an issue. Though you could design around this, with a horizontal wooden beam to contain the horizontal runs at some point up the wall.

This is a sketch of the idea, at this point, there’s no release date announced, and the two are looking for investors…

Images: Ecocustomhomes
Source: Jetson Green

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Straw Building Blocks Make Warm Sustainable Homes