Part of Phase 2: First Year
Housing in Phase 2 starts from one decision that everything else depends on: Permanent Settlement Site Selection is the explicit prerequisite for five of the other ten articles here, and its own description calls that out directly — a settlement built without reliable water nearby hauls it uphill for every day it exists. Once that site is chosen, the section splits into wall-building methods, water and waste systems, and the specialized structures — barns, storage, greenhouses — that get added once the basics hold.
Site Selection feeds four different building methods directly. Passive Solar Building Design lets winter sun in and keeps summer sun out, storing the difference in thermal mass that releases it slowly overnight. Earthbag Building stacks dirt-filled bags like bricks, strong enough to resist both earthquakes and bullets. Straw Bale Construction delivers R-30 insulation or better, proven in Nebraska buildings over a century old. Gravity-Fed Water & Plumbing Systems turns elevation into pressure — every meter between source and tap worth about 0.1 bar, the same physics that ran Roman aqueducts for kilometers. Earthbag Building then feeds Underground & Earth-Sheltered Buildings, which itself feeds Storage Buildings: ground temperature barely moves below about 2 meters, where a building above ground in the same climate can face a 55°C annual swing, and that stability is exactly what grain, root vegetables, and smoked or dried meat each need in their own way once stored.
Composting Toilet Systems is the one article that doesn’t need Site Selection at all — it only requires basic sanitation and basic construction, and turns waste into pathogen-free compost using no water. It joins Gravity-Fed Plumbing as the two required inputs to Greywater Recycling Systems, which has a real number behind it: four people produce 100-200 liters of greywater a day, enough to irrigate a serious garden once it’s diverted instead of dumped.
Passive Solar Building Design also feeds Greenhouse & Cold Frame Construction — simple cold frames, walled 40-50 cm at the back sloping to 20-30 cm at the front, add 4-8 weeks onto both ends of the growing season. Barn & Livestock Housing Design is the last structure in the chain, needing Site Selection plus basic animal husbandry: chickens need about 0.4 square meters of coop space each, and the same dry-bedding and predator rules scale up to every species kept.
Site and Walls
Where to build, and the four wall systems that all start from that same decision.
- Permanent Settlement Site Selection
- Passive Solar Building Design
- Earthbag Building
- Straw Bale Construction
Underground, Storage, and Livestock
Stable temperature below ground, the storage it makes possible, and the barn that still needs a chosen site above it.
- Underground & Earth-Sheltered Buildings
- Storage Buildings: Silos, Cellars, & Preservation
- Barn & Livestock Housing Design
Water, Waste, and Growing Season
Moving water in, waste out, and the season a passive-solar structure can stretch at both ends.