The $50 & Up Underground House Book teaches how to build the lowest cost, most sunshine-filled, best ventilated and driest underground houses of all. It teaches how to incorporate greenhouses, root cellars and fallout shelters into an underground home. It covers both hillside and flat land design, and explains how to solve drainage problems with dependable gravity rather then expensive, failure-prone building materials. It also details ways to pass or otherwise deal with the building codes.

The $50 & Up Underground House Book is the only book to explain in detail author Mike Oehlers revolutionary Post/Shoring/Polyethylene building method, which cuts building materials to the absolute minimum. (See the video/DVD section for an illustration comparing P/S/P with the materials used in normal frame house construction.)



But The $50 & Up Underground House Book does much more than just cut your building material costs by up to 90%. It is widely recognized as the book which offers the reader the greatest possibilities for light, air and views in an underground home. Where most owner-designers and even professional architects are stuck on the disastrous "First Thought" concept, a design which greatly limits view, sunshine and air flow, and which usually causes staggering drainage problems, Oehler offers the "Basic Design" with the "Up Hill Patio" which solves these problems and more. He explains the weaknesses of the other three design concepts favored by conventional architects: skylights, vertical window wells and atriums. For example, though skylights admit a rewarding amount of light, they are hard to use for ventilation and fire escape, get dirty quicker, often leak, admit too much of the summer sun, too little of the winter rays, and offer no view whatsoever. They may have special applications, Oehler argues, but there are better design concepts for normal use.

Now in its seventh edition, it has sold more than 90,000 copies and has received enthusiastic reviews from Mother Earth News, National Public Radio and many others. Many consider it the classic in its field.



The $50 & Up Underground House Book reprises all these advantages, and more. The book discusses in detail more than 50 different topics related to underground construction. This big, 112-page, 8 1/2" x 11" book contains: 4 pages of engineering tables and diagrams

8 floor plans

54 photos

100+ illustrations

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What an Underground House Is Not

Chapter 2: What an Underground House Is  23 Advantages

Chapter 3: Histories of the $50 and $500 Underground Houses

Chapter 4: The PSP System

Chapter 5: Design

The Basic Design

Posts

Elevation Changes

Views, Light, Ventilation

Five approved Methods of Design

-Uphill Patio

-Offset Room

-The Royer Foyer

-Clerestories

-Gables

Drainage

Special Designs

Flat-Land Designs

Special Effects

Special Features

Patio Barbecue Area

The Bachelor Bar

Built-in Greenhouses

Root Cellar/Fallout Shelster/Wine Cellar

Built-in Coolers Chapter 6: Materials: Where to Buy and Scrounge

Wrecking Buildings

Windows

Auctions

Sawmill Lumber

Polyethylene

Concrete

Fee Timber Sources

Working Up Posts and Beams

Chapter 7: Construction

Secret Construction Method

The Excavation

Building the Structure Chapter 8: You And the Building Codes

Appendices



This is an abridged table of contents. Theres more in the book. Its simply the No. 1 information source for anyone wanting to build low-cost underground homes, offices or shelters.



Heres what Natural Life Magazine wrote about the book:



"The ideas and methods are quite often unorthodox  but stronger for it. The design theory is well based in experience and appears to work well. Straightforward diagrams and black-and-white photos illustrate many construction and design points a very useful and pleasant book for anyone wanting to build an inexpensive but solid underground structure."

Only $19.95

Order using our online form, by mail or by phone.

