A Milk House Made of Tires

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We need a milk house, desperately. A building where we can wash up all our milking equipment (which is being done in the Looney Bin now) and store all our root veggies and canned food overflow, as well as place for our freezers and an extra fridge for all our milk products like cheese and yogurt. Contrary to popular belief, a milk house is not the place where we milk our cow or shelter her. That takes place in another small cow shed.

Most normal folks would use wood and drywall to build a milk house (that's how we built our first one in 1999) but no, we have to use tires. Why?

There are three basic reasons:
          1. There were numerous tires left on our property when we bought it and after reading about
              the EARTHSHIP CONCEPT in the southern part of the US, we decided we eventually
              wanted to do the same.
          2. Before we attempt to build an entire home based on tires, we thought building a "prototype"
               would be beneficial.
          3. After comparing the costs of other building types, we can get more space for our
              dollar by using tires as the main walls of our milk house build, and by building into a hill
              to save heating costs.

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This build will start, we hope, in early summer. After the sale of our other farm we had a small amount left over for this build, so it's a capital expense that shouldn't affect our regular monthly budget. If we plan everything down to the littlest screw, it shouldn't. If we do the majority of the work ourselves, it shouldn't. If we don't have to pay a ton in fees and permits and waivers, it shouldn't. We have just $5000 to build a 24 by 12 foot milk house.

The milk house floor plans are in flux right now, one of our sons is tweaking it on his CAD program. When he's done I'll post it here. In the meantime we have a lot of ground work to accomplish. The Illinois EPA won't allow us to build anything with tires until we complete a BUD (benefit use determination) application, not even a small doghouse. Yes, I asked. This seven page document requires us to document where the tires came from, how we plan to use them, how their use is more beneficial than conventional materials and on and on and on.

We also have to work with our own county on building permits. I'll be chatting with the same guy who dealt with us on the building of our grain bin house and who is currently working with me on the permits I'll need for our family graveyard. You can imagine how thrilled he'll be to hear about this new project!