We are taking our first incremental steps towards designing a floating house. Yesterday, the workers built a very preliminary mock-up structure out of eucalyptus wood and bamboo. Here is how it looks:

Note that this is a test of the size, not the shape. So it is a “house like structure” in the size we are currently contemplating: 8m x 4m footprint and about 4.6m high at the peak of the roof.

The next step is to build a simple wooden structure to hold the 200L drums we will use for flotation and then lift this “house” structure and mount it on top. Based on my rough calculations, this whole house structure weighs about 150kg, not including flotation support structure. So 5 or 6 people ought to be able to easily lift it up and place it onto the water.

Our plan is to buy around 12 of the 200L drums on Monday, depending on how many we can pack into our work truck. The plan is to have two parallel 6m eucalyptus poles lashed to a row of 4 200L drums between them. Then one of these rows for left, middle, and right side of the house (left, middle, and right as seen in the bottom picture above). From a flotation perspective, this should result in about 2400kg of flotation, which is easily 10x the weight of the structure. But hopefully this will give us enough stability that people can walk around the structure. And who wants this thing tipping over in the water, anyway?

At that point, we should be able to walk around the pond and visualize what such a sized house will look like in the pond, as well as whether the house will have enough room to turn around. (Yes, I do want my floating house to be able to turn around. 🙂

After that, we will be tearing the structure down. The eucalyptus wood is recycled from a nearby temporary billboard that they discarded after tearing down the structure, and we’ve been using it for miscellaneous construction support for the past year or so. The drums will be recycled into a small (about 2m x 3m) flat floor ferry boat we are planning to build to shuttle people around the pond.

I am very excited now to see these ideas we’ve been kicking around for a number of months start the process of testing and then construction!