Stucky Pictorial Essay: 5 COOL HOMES FOR PREPPERS

1)– Go ahead and name the world’s smallest country. Liechtenstein? Monaco? Oh, yeah, it’s Vatican City, right? Wrong.  It’s the Principality of Sealand.

 

During the Second World War the British government built several Fortress islands in the North Sea to defend its coasts from German invaders. These forts were built illegally in international waters. One of these Fortresses, consisting of concrete and steel construction, was the famous royal fort Roughs Tower situated slightly north of the estuary region of the Thames River. This fortress was situated at a distance of approximately 7 nautical miles from the coast, which is more than double the then applicable 3 mile range of territorial waters; to put it briefly, this island was situated in the international waters of the North Sea.

In 1966 Roy Bates a former infantry major in the first battalion Royal Fusiliers whose regimental headquarters strangely enough was the “Tower of London”  decided to take over the fortress. It was Christmas Eve 1966. 2nd of September 1967 along with his son Michael (14), daughter Penelope (16) and several friends and followers Roy declared The Principality of Sealand raising a newly designed flag and making his beautiful wife “Princess Joan”. It was her birthday and Roy gave her the best and most romantic present he could think of the title of Princess.  The Brits immediately started blowing up similar nearby structures and held up signs “You’re next”.  However, the independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. 

From their website —- “Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity.”

The GOOD NEWS for TBPers is that you can be granted citizenship! Escape USA Taxes!! You can buy a Sealander ID for $50, purchase the title of Lord or Lady for $60, become a Count or Countess for $400 ….. or, even purchase real estate for just $40 ………….. here, http://www.sealandgov.org/title-pack

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2)–HANGING MONASTERY (Xuankong, China)

 

There are five” Most-Sacred” mountains in China and Mt. Heng is one of them. It is the only existing temple with the combination of three Chinese traditional religions: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Built in 491AD it still clings to the side of the cliff using engineering techniques that are still of significant interest to modern architects. The structure is kept in place with oak crossbeams fitted into holes chiseled into the cliffs. The main supportive structure is hidden inside the bedrock.

 

Why build a monastery like this? 1) Location. Building a monastery on the sides of a sheer cliff shields it from floods and the mountain peak protects it from rain, snow, and diminishes damage from the sun. 2) The builders followed a principle in Taoism: no noises, including those from roosters crowing and dogs barking …. this temple is a place of solemn silence.

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3)–  “OF THE ROCK” —- (Al Hajarah, Yemen)

Al Hajjara 

This incredible walled town has been built on the top a massive rocky outcrop within the Haraz Mountains of western central Yemen in a region known as the San‘a’ Governorate.  Its history is so ancient that not even the inhabitants can be sure when the first settlers arrived but it is officially said to date back to at least the 12th century. The houses themselves are fortified and feature substantial storage facilities such as granaries and cisterns in case of siege.

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4)–  THE HOUSE OF STONE, Portugal

This is not a photo-shopped picture. It is a real house in the rural settings of the Fafe mountains in northern Portugal. A Casa do Penedo, or “the House of Stone,” was built in 1974 between four large boulders found on the site. Although the house may seem rustic, it is not lacking in amenities, which include a fireplace and a swimming pool–carved out of one of the large rocks. But, as word has spread, the sleepy little house has had visitors venturing to see it in droves ….. and the owner has had to install bullet-proof windows and a steel door to prevent the robbery attempts and vandalism.

 Cool stone-homes are found around the world.  Here’s another very nice one in France.

 

 

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5)- MATMÂTA – Tunisia

How about just digging a hole in the sand?   About 200 miles south of the capital city, Tunis, is the remarkable settlement of Matmâta.  Here the inhabitants have dug deep pits into the ground and then tunneled into the side walls to create their homes. There are various legends to explain why the Berbers of this region started to build their homes in this fashion.  One is that it was to hide from the invading Egyptians and another is that they already existed to some extent and were the original caves of desert monsters that had long since departed. 

Not only is this site ancient and probably dates back to the Roman period and Punic Wars, its existence remained largely unknown until the mid 1960’s.  It truly came to the attention of the world when it was selected as the location for Luke Sky Walker’s home on the planet Tatooine in the 1977 Star Wars film – A New Hope.

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Bonus Picture:  FLOATING HOUSE, Ukraine …aka How In The Fuck Does This NOT Fall Down?? 

It’s actually a potato sorting station. Trucks drive under the metal  cones at the bottom and load up with taters. Apparently, gravity functions differently in Ukraine.

 

 

 

Author: Stucky

I'm right, you're wrong. Deal with it.

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Dan
Dan

well crap, those are a lot better than my prepper house

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Eddie
Eddie

There’s some great Anazazi dwellings in the desert southwest of New Mexico. But they’ve been abandoned for more than a thousand years. No water.

It’s not the house that’s the main thing. It’s the garden.

Eddie
Eddie

A shipping container suitable for the kind of houses you are looking at is more like 5-6K. But they are great structures, if you have the equipment to work with them.

AWD

Nice post Stuck, very cool. I love imagining living in places like that. Well done.

BUCKHED
BUCKHED

Stuck…you could never build that place in Tunisia….no hand rails on the steps and of course not wheel chair accessible . I’ve had a few go rounds with the county council on building permits . I firmly believe that I should have to get one to build on my own property .

bb

Stucky , most Americans would never live in these houses. No air conditioning . Got to have air conditioning . It’s as important as running water for most people. Other wise very nice pictures.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

I’d take that stone house in Portugal.. or the one in France.

Who needs AC in a stone house? They stay amazingly cool in the summer, even in Missouri, which has a lot of lovely old small towns built of native stone, of which MO has a large supply. Yet they insulate beautifully against the cold in the winter- just get wood shutters that close over the windows, and you have a very cozy, liveable home with minimal climate control necessary. My late great grandmother on my father’s side lived an an ancient one-room stone cottage, in a little village of them, where she’d lived forever and where I saw her for the first and only time, when I was a little girl c. 1960. I recall a very old and blind lady with a waist length fall of beautiful white hair, sitting in a cane wheelchair. She was in her 90s at the time. The house did not have electricity or running water, and it was in a little village-like enclave of similar houses, all of which were extremely old.

All you need is to locate in a place with plentiful stone. I think the best thing about these houses, even more than their other virtues and their beauty, is that they handle very well the ground movements that cause concrete foundations and brick walls to crack. You almost never need to tuckpoint them, if they were built properly to begin with.

Welshman
Welshman

Nice Stuck,

The Sealand Territory was certainly thinking out of the box.

Eddie
Eddie

Sealand is a joke, imho. They’ve been “about” to do this or that for years, but never get anything done. It’s an interesting anomaly, not a place to live. Eventually climate change will turn it into Atlantis anyway. Or a Big Wave surfing destination.

Anonymous
Anonymous

The Freedom Ship

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Freedom Ship is a floating city project initially proposed in the late 1990s.[1] It was so named because of the “free” international lifestyle facilitated by a mobile ocean colony, though the project would not be a conventional ship, but rather a series of linked barges.
The Freedom Ship project envisions a 1,317m (0.818 miles)-long integrated city[2] with condominium housing for 50,000 people,[2] an airstrip to accommodate turboprop aircraft, duty-free shopping and other facilities, large enough to require rapid transit. The complex would circumnavigatethe globe continuously, stopping regularly at ports of call.[3]

Envision an ideal place to live or run a business, a friendly, safe and secure community with large areas of open space and extensive entertainment and recreational facilities. Finally, picture this community continually moving around the world. You are beginning to understand the Freedom Ship concept of a massive ocean-going vessel. With a design length of 4,500 feet, a width of 750 feet, and a height of 350 feet, Freedom Ship would be more than 4 times longer than the Queen Mary. The design concepts include a mobile modern city featuring luxurious living, an extensive duty-free international shopping mall, and a full 1.7 million square foot floor set aside for various companies to showcase their products.

Freedom Ship would not be a cruise ship, it is proposed to be a unique place to live, work, retire, vacation, or visit. The proposed voyage would continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world’s coastal regions. Its large fleet of commuter aircraft and hydrofoils would ferry residents and visitors to and from shore. The airport on the ship’s top deck would serve private and small commercial aircraft (up to about 40 passengers each). The proposed vessel’s superstructure, rising twenty-five stories above its broad main deck, would house residential space, a library, schools, and a first-class hospital in addition to retail and wholesale shops, banks, hotels, restaurants, entertainment facilities, casinos, offices, warehouses, and light manufacturing and assembly enterprises. Finally, this concept would include a wide array of recreational and athletic facilities, worthy of a world-class resort, making Freedom Ship a veritable “Community on the Sea.”

freedomship.com

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Olga
Olga

1

I’ve always enjoyed this blog …. makes all the “McMansions” look disgraceful.

bb

Olga, that’s a nice blog.

I’ve always enjoyed http://TinyDicksAreFun.blogspot.com

WrenX
WrenX

Great photos, Stucky. What a fun read.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

I have always been baffled, and amused, by the “seasteading” fad among some rich libertarian types, and I’m with Stucky on the “Freedom Ship”. I can’t think of a better way to assure you won’t survive the Turning than to strand yourself in a floating city in the middle of the ocean that is totally dependent on extremely advanced technology, copious quantities of resources, and a very high degree of regimentation, just for its inhabitants to survive. Shipboard life is challenging enough when everything is working well, and provisions and fuel are easy and cheap to obtain. That won’t be the case in a serious world crises.

The luxurious barges would quickly turn into floating prisons and death camps as the remaining formerly rich residents fought over the remaining food and water, while

The only way to survive a collapsing society is to build a life that consumes very few resources, and where you have as much flexibility and freedom as possible- to grow food, to move about as you please, and to fade into the woodwork.

GilbertS
GilbertS

I don’t know, there are lots of long-distance sailors who prove you can spend long periods of time at sea and survive quite well. The folks who transit the Pacific have to be real survivalists to be a thousand miles from help and make it.

I grew up sailing on a 40 foot gaff-rigged two masted schooner everywhere from the Bahamas to CT and as far out as Bermuda. It was a very low-tech boat and required a lot of maintenance, but it was largely low-tech maintenance, i.e. constant lube to the propeller shaft every… I dunno, 24-48 hours, constant attention to the old diesel engine, the heads worked, but anything beyond poo and some paper might cause them to detonate, and the wood was in constant need of oiling or sanding and varnish. Back then, the height of direction finding was LORAN, a series of transmitters for helping plot your location.

Later, we had a 45 foot 2-masted ketch built by Amel of France. She had autohelm, radar, GPS, a fridge, ice box, lots of water, lots of fuel, and she made several transatlantic trips. She was very comfortable for a sailboat. She was built so 2 people could take care of all the work, largely from the cockpit.

One thing I would say is you can’t run with only 2 people for very long-We learned that the hard way transiting the Bosphorus into the Black Sea to Varna, Bulgaria. That was an awful run. That run, the autohelm broke down, sort of like having to drive a car with dead power steering, so you had to manhandle the wheel. Keeping on the compass with a dead wheel and rough seas is a bitch. The weather was rough and it is a high-traffic area. Also, the charts all listed Bulgaria as still having mine fields off the coast. We never got enough sleep and you constantly lost sleep as time passed because you still needed to eat, get dry, use the head, etc after your watch. Plus, we both spent some extra time in the cockpit after watch handover to keep each other company and awake. It was a rough trip.

Oh, and based off our time in Odessa, Ukraine, I think the real threat is when you bring your boat into port. That’s where all the weirdos and crooks are. We had to hire security people to watch our boat, lest we be assaulted. (One night we were, but the security guys showed up in time. After that, we ditched the US flag and hired constant security.)

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

Gilbert, the traditional sea skills are the only way to survive out there. You can do it, for sure, but it is much more difficult and requires a much more diversified skill set than most of these rich seasteaders have. The only way to do it is to acquire the skills, and your own boat, and hope for a lot of luck when you are out at sea. There is one woman here in Chicago who rebuilt a small, decrepit sailboat and sailed alone on the high seas. She had to set her own broken arm and repair a broken main mast by herself, with what tools she had on hand. She lived this way for years, loved every minute of it and weathered the hardships and mishaps well, but just slightly worse luck would have been the end of her. Yet even she had to find a way to hustle money in strange places so she could restock, and she had to be extremely disciplined and careful in her consumption of water and food. For a large number of people to live this way on one vessel would mean loss of freedom and a degree of regimentation that would make the typical over-regulated American city seem like a libertarian dream compared. I can’t imagine the typical TBP poster tolerating it.

The way these seasteading communities of rich libertarians are trying to do it, what with building floating cities extremely dependent on advanced technology, specialized materials, and a very rich population that will endure extreme regimentation and total loss of personal freedom, is guaranteed to fail. For one thing, these places take too much money and resources, but most of all are dependent upon our present complex, expensive systems for their materials, medical care, food, and other necessities, and they seem to take the continued existence of the current order for granted. That won’t work.

GilbertS
GilbertS

Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to live on that thing. No way, Jose. I’ve been on a cruise ship and I hated every minute of it. After growing up the way I did, and always being taught to hate powerboaters (2 very distinct cultures on the water), going from that to a family reunion cruise was a real letdown.

It was just so… romper room. It was the kind of Disney fungineered fake guided experience I really hate. And the passengers were incredible slobs who just wanted to shovel the free cafeteria food into their faces. They would have a tray heaped high with stuff and be standing in line, shoveling it into their mouths as fast as they could BEFORE getting the next item and returning to their table. It was disgusting. And, thanks to previous slobs, you weren’t even trusted to take so much as a slice of meatloaf or scoop of salad on your own-the crew did that for you. So you had to keep handing them your tray or plate to do what any child could reasonably be expected to do. And there’s the possibility of illness with so many folks crammed into such a small place. I guess we’ve seen what happens when your engines fail, your generators go down, and thousands of toilets all back up at the same time on a cruise ship.

I could see someone just leasing a retired cruise liner or converted cargo ship for their traveling freedom ship, but not building a massive floating monstrosity. With that much money, why not just buy your own country? I bet some 3rd world hole would be happy to look the other way while you customize an island into your own nation. Save your money for bribes, not a Titanic waiting to happen, and buy your freedom from the Thai govt or the Bahamas or whomever.
Or here’s one no one wants:

“If you prefer a cold-weather climate, Marie Byrd Land would be a better fit. It’s a massive bit of land (620,000 square miles) in Antarctica that — again — no one wants. It’s an expansive frozen tundra with apparently nothing to offer except hostility and volcanoes. All nations with stakes in Antarctica have opted out of claiming it because it’s so remote. The territory has a long coastline and has been the site of several expeditions and experiments. The base “Byrd Station,” owned by the US Navy, is located here. If the desert isn’t your scene, give Marie Byrd Land a go. It’s a frosty 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/offbeat/130621/last-unclaimed-land-earth-bir-tawil-antartica

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Chicago999444
Chicago999444

I just don’t see how anyone who already hates normal life in a big city, could think he could for one minute tolerate life on a floating island a mile long with 40,000 people on it, that you can’t easily get off of and where you are interdependent to a degree that makes life in a city apt feel like rural isolation compared.

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