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Title: An Architectural Question
Source:
Myself
URL Source: http://None
Published: Feb 12, 2007
Author: Myself
Post Date: 2007-02-12 01:26:10 by ...
Keywords: None
Views: 284
Comments: 4
The house I live in is a very old and was originally built without indoor plumbing. The bathroom was kludged into an old pantry at the early 1900s and doesn't work very well. Very cramped and dingy like a seond bathroom in a modern house. When the snow melts off I want to build a new bathroom centered around a large clawfoot tub I found. There is an old school bus parked out in one of the pastures that a bunch of hippies left sometime in the last century. I've wanted to haul it off for years but all the quotes I get are obscene. My neighbor wanted to buy it to make a camper. He raised the hood, lost interest and now it has been sitting out there with the hood up for the past two years. The bus is huge. Maybe thirty five feet long. Tonight I had the idea of backing the bus up to the rear of the house house, building a hallway to the emergency exit and using it for the new bathroom. I would install windows in the roof so that it could also be used for a green house. Put it up on blocks, remove the wheels, skirt it and and have an artist I know paint it up. Put the clawfoot tub in the middle. This would save the cost of the lumber for the bathroom and would save the $600 bucks the junkyard wants to haul off the bus. You couldn't see the bus from the front of the house and there is nothing but pastures and forest behind. No one goes back there anyway as there is a mean horse out there. I talked to one friend about it and she thought it was a good idea, but she lives in Ward Colorado where most of the houses are like this. Could this be an attractive addition or does the idea have too much of a taint of white trash/hippie house about it? My only neighbor, who collects used lumber and junk cars and trucks for a hobby, probably wouldn't notice - so this isn't a problem.
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#1. To: ... (#0)
Post Comment Private Reply Bookmark You live in a good neighborhood. My thought is metal structures are tremendous heat losses in the winter. May be put a layer of hay bales around the outside for insulation??? My wife and I have always been interested in the "earthship" or hay bale structure concept. Found it very interesting that Xenophon in his "Anabasis" ( the exiting) took note of villages living in underground houses, complete with livestock in what must have been central Turkey, c. 300( check that date)
I would think it would be pretty cold in the winter. Not much insulation in a school bus. I'd spend a little time each day scrapping it out to 2 foot sections. It's been quite a while since I rode one, but isn't there alot of aluminum in a bus? If all else fails, you can half-bury the damn thing and make a helluva table-top jump for a dirtbike.
There is a type of foam I can put on the inside and then cover it with cloth, but it still has a lot of glass. I will have a good gas heater inside and also a wood stove. The gas can bring it up from 40 to 75 degrees pretty quick. In the winter you would just have to turn the heater on 15 minutes before using the tub or keep the wood stove going. Keep it closed off from the house when it is not in use and maybe just close it off and drain the pipes in Dec and Jan.
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Do you have a septic tank or a drain field? Will you tie into the house drain or did you factor in the backhoe to dig? I like the bus idea, but if it isn't insulated well and the water lines protected with electric heat tape, in cold weather you'll have frozen pipes under the bus. Even 4" sewer pipes can freeze the solids in very cold weather. Add-on bathrooms with any pipes above ground are problematical unless you live in a warm climate where 15 degree temps are never seen. The bus will be very hard to heat as an extension of a home, and the pipes under the skirt will give you lots of trouble if it's cold there. trust me.
My only neighbor, who collects used lumber and junk cars and trucks for a hobby, probably wouldn't notice - so this isn't a problem.
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#3. To: tom007 (#1)
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