So glad I come across your videos over your dome house build. All of them giving me a good idea of what to do and what to expect. Hope to get one build soon and willing to do much of it myself. Family has land in Venus Tx (about 30min from Monolithic Dome company) that I am eventually moving to and would love to have one of these domes. Want at least a 1500sqft setup, and I have plenty of space to expand later down the line.
I am happy we can help a bit although I do think things vary a lot depending on location. Going into our build we felt like there wasn’t any information online. We have pretty much stumbled our way through this build. Check out my blog for all the details. It follows all the ups and downs we went through. Especially in the beginning before the builders got here and put up the shell. There is a link on this channel but it is dometastic.blogspot.com I will admit I haven’t been updating it nearly as much as I have in the past because most people seem to prefer my other accounts (CZcams and Instagram) and writing the blog is very time consuming. Goodluck with your build! You should have a much easier time than us building right by Monolithic!
Ok forget my diameter question in another video. I see they are 32 ft. my 2 will be 38 ft each pushed together to make a length of 59ft. Your videos give a much better feel for the size of domes on the inside vs my Sketchup 3D walk through. I'm just in the beginning stages of actual design after getting county engineer's stamp requirements figured.
@@dometastic you have a great layout. My florida gulf little lot didn't give me a wider option that 40 ft x 75 ft to stay above the flood zone. As much as I would love to do as much hands on as you are doing I'm more interested in moving in to enjoy retirement. Looks like you are in snow country which is exactly what I've had enough of.
@@doclees11 We would have loved to have someone else do the work and move in quick. :) Unfortunately we need to save money by doing it ourselves (we couldn't get a building loan on something so different) AND it is super hard to find contractors that are willing to do something round. Goodluck on your build! It is an adventure even if someone else is swinging the hammer!
@@dometastic exactly on the contractors. One contractor that builds million dollar homes on pillars said he wouldn't know how to estimate a round house. None of these guys heard of time and materials? I'm lucky enough to have a master plumber brother and a cabinet maker willing to make the trip(paid) to FL. It's a start. Never thought that would be an issue. My issues have been with county flood zoning employees that were clueless.
this is super cool information! Can’t wait to see your finished home! I am curious about your experience with Monolithic Dome Institute. What were the costs like for all of the drawings? Did they work with you to get permits and stuff? Also, how do you go about getting financing for such an unconventional build? I really hope these kinds of homes become more mainstream; they seem super cool and actually practical.
Oh boy... I feel like I need another video to answer your questions... or to hang out and have coffee for an hour! 😂 I will break these up a little and encourage you to go read my blog because I have put all the down and dirty details there...although be prepared to spend some hours. Monolithic was great to work with once you start the process by doing a feasibility study. If you just send them questions before that I didn’t get much of a response. I think they get a lot of tire kickers and they are booked with jobs. They do not help you with permits. My advise is to go to your town armed with information about monolithic domes BEFORE you buy land to build. We did it when we had land picked out but hadn’t made an offer yet. We showed them the land we were considering and all the info about the dome and asked if it would be a problem. We talked to all the departments. You can find out if they will require stamped engineering. If you will need stamped engineering find out next from your state how hard it is to get a structural engineering license if the engineer is out of state. The guy monolithic sends you too is licensed in like 20 states already so maybe you will luck out!
Costs... this is going to be dependent on where you are located. Costs vary widely state to state. Full disclosure, we live in one of the most expensive states with high taxes etc. The plans from monolithic in 2017 when we started this were (I think) about $4500. I would have to go back and look though our records for an accurate number though because it was so long ago. This included the feasibility study and completely custom standard construction documents working with their designer. We had so many revisions and it took months. The site plan (this is super location specific and includes... soil tests, perk tests, septic staking, as built, engineered septic design and complete design of our specific house onto the land) was about $4000. It is important to note that the surveyor we chose was cheaper by about $2k than others because he had done the subdivision of the original farm and still had all the files. He did not need to create everything from scratch. The engineering is were everything blew up for us. We had to hire two firms. The experienced guy was about $2300. The local company was just about $10k by the time they were done.😳 The original quote was $6k. That’s another thing about building a custom home. It is no joke that things run over all the time! Towards the end of the engineers involvement with the build we flat out told them that there could be NO MORE OVER RUNS! They had budgeted a certain number of hours for each stage of their involvement but consistently went over and it all added up with us getting bills for another $800 etc etc. Eesh! Big take away from building is that quotes are not the actual final cost... it is just the company giving you what they think it will cost unless they specifically state that it won’t go over. I have never had something come back less than quoted.
Financing is another hard one that really depends on your situation. If you live in an area with other monolithic domes I think it would be easier. We were not able to get a construction loan (the main reason we are doing most of the build ourselves). We did get a loan to cover the shell construction through a local farm credit bank. They used property we already owned as the collateral but couldn’t give us more than 75% of what our land was worth because they are required by law to use comps sold within 6 months. They stretched it a bit and went a year. All that was acceptable to them were old geodesic dome homes in our area that had sold for the price of the land. The side effect of the government stepping in after the housing collapse in the 2000’s to regulate banks. They were stopping predatory lending but collateral damage are the unique houses. I have heard that sometimes banks will use other concrete or unique homes but that wasn’t our experience. They were stuck on it being round. The rest of our money is savings (sale of another house we fixed up and sold) and out of pocket. We will end up moving in before the house is done to save all the monthly expenses related to renting. It is not a one year and done build for us. It is a long haul build that we slowly do ourselves.
@@dometastic wow thank you so much for all your advice! I have been reading through your blog and now I’m really excited to keep following your journey! Financing is just making me hesitate a lot about building my own dome home. I’m hoping to save up enough in the next 5-10 years to pay in cash for a really basic build. You’re such a great resource; thank you!!
@@adelehare8495 yeah, financing is a huge stumbling block for most people. We started saving to do this 10 yrs ago. 😬 There are banks out there that will lend (usually small local ones that don’t resell their loans) but it requires a lot of calling and being turned down. I did write all about that in the blog. Our bank specializes in local agricultural loans and unusual properties. Like off grid etc. Don’t expect a warm reception from any of the big national banks. I actually found (after I had given up) ours because a person I am connected with in Ohio built a monolithic and told me about their experience. I just looked it up and found they had a local chapter of the credit union here. Mine is Farm Credit East.
I will add a comment here with the prices spiking for steel rebar... I struck me that we used about 5 tons of rebar in total between the footer, stem wall, ring beam and dome... just something to keep in mind as prices seem to like doubling these days...
Thank you for sharing. What coating are you using on the exterior so that the concrete holds up to the elements? Great videos and great project. Thanks again.
I just saw your comment, sorry for the delay! The exterior isn’t concrete. At least not yet. The exterior is the airform. The airform is made from single ply pVC roofing material. It’s the same stuff that they use for commercial flat roofs. This is fine for 20 yrs as is. We will need to coat the exterior in something else before the 20 yr mark. If we can afford it we have decided to coat the exterior in concrete and then lime wash it.
If you would be up for It, I would love to see what your word picture was like. I am currently working on mine and would love to see a baseline example. www.monolithic.org/plandesign-residential/a-word-picture-how-to-design-your-own-dome-home Mine will be mostly underground as well which has its own challenges.
Your cost is going to vary by location and how much you do yourself vs. hire and what materials you use to finish it. Sorry to be vague but it is really site dependent. We hired South Industries to come out and do our shell. It was $72 a square foot for their part. Ours included the air form, ring beam, floor tension beams, the exterior shell, all materials and labor included. (as well as everything related to them coming to our site to work for 6-8 weeks) This does not include any site work, foundation... other than the ring beam, land, concrete floor or any labor or materials related to finishing the dome other than the plain shell itself. I have heard that it can be more like low $60's per square foot if you go with a single dome and are not over 2000k miles from them like us. Monolithic has a feasibility study that helps you figure out how much it will cost you to build. It does cost about $500 but that is applied to the cost of your plans. Here is the link to their designing process where you figure out what you want, need and can afford. This is where we started after we bought their Dome living book. www.monolithic.org/feasibility-residential
@@dometastic Thanks but what's your total square footage you paid for so I can do the numbers? Your doing some of it yourself so I would assume housing sqft costs are not what you actually paid. I know price varies greatly depending on location but ball park numbers help for planning budgets overall.
@@dustinjeffries526 Our house is 4 domes with a total square footage of 2735. We have done everything ourselves except what I listed above. That hired out part for the shell was $72 per sq ft. The only additional thing in the whole build (so far) that we hired someone to do is to pour the slab floor. That cost us an additional $7k. I have no idea what the livable finished build cost would be if we had a builder doing the whole thing.
We joke that the footer and foundation was designed for a parking garage not a house. 😂 We think the engineers were compensating for not fully understanding the structure. 🤷♀️
@@dometastic It all depends on the soil/potential settlement, and they just did not want to sharpen the pencil - because there is not enough in this job for them to do that. If any project would justify very little rebar, it would be a dome.
@@dometastic We had the same with ours. It costs the engineer nothing to make it way stronger than it needs to be and he sleeps better at night. I did fight him on a couple things, such as he specified all #5 rebar. I asked him if he ever hand rolled #5 rebar? He had not, but that wasn't his concern. It wasn't until I asked him to show me the calcs justifying #5 rebar that he agreed I could switch to #4 rebar, but then he increased the number of pieces by 50%.
@@SimonHomeintheEarth Ours made us put #5 in the footer but everywhere else it was #4. There is a HUGE difference working with #5! Our plans originally called for all the rebar to be epoxy coated. We pushed back on that. We are not near the ocean (its 40 miles away as the crow flies) and the property isn't wet...we are at the top of a hill. The rebar supplier was confused why we needed it so I researched a bit. My research said that coated rebar is typically used in bridges and overpasses when adverse conditions are expected. (salt water and/or always wet) The engineer was like yeah.... well it is better than uncoated but I guess you don't have to do that since it won't be subjected to excessive moisture or salt. That is one of the reasons we joke about it being designed like a parking garage or bridge.
If only it worked like that! 😂 Maybe somewhere in the world a building department would accept blurry, drawn on plans (specific to our airform) that you can’t read the fine print on but I am guessing if they do…you probably didn’t need to submit plans in the first place.
Thank you for sharing your information and experience. I'm grateful I found you!!! ❤❤❤
Wow! I had no clue so much was involved. Thanks for sharing this because I totally would’ve been caught off-guard when I get my Monolithic Dome.
So glad I come across your videos over your dome house build. All of them giving me a good idea of what to do and what to expect.
Hope to get one build soon and willing to do much of it myself.
Family has land in Venus Tx (about 30min from Monolithic Dome company) that I am eventually moving to and would love to have one of these domes. Want at least a 1500sqft setup, and I have plenty of space to expand later down the line.
I am happy we can help a bit although I do think things vary a lot depending on location. Going into our build we felt like there wasn’t any information online. We have pretty much stumbled our way through this build. Check out my blog for all the details. It follows all the ups and downs we went through. Especially in the beginning before the builders got here and put up the shell. There is a link on this channel but it is dometastic.blogspot.com I will admit I haven’t been updating it nearly as much as I have in the past because most people seem to prefer my other accounts (CZcams and Instagram) and writing the blog is very time consuming. Goodluck with your build! You should have a much easier time than us building right by Monolithic!
Awesome video, a must watch before anyone builds one of these beautiful homes. Thanks for all the details, love the symmety and your curved walls.
Thank you so much for sharing.
0:00 - Construction Documents
10:24 - Engineering Documents
15:29 - Site Plan (Step 1)
16:26 - Shop Drawings (by rebar supplier)
19:20 - Shop Drawings for Stem wall
Ok forget my diameter question in another video. I see they are 32 ft. my 2 will be 38 ft each pushed together to make a length of 59ft. Your videos give a much better feel for the size of domes on the inside vs my Sketchup 3D walk through. I'm just in the beginning stages of actual design after getting county engineer's stamp requirements figured.
If it helps ours is about 75ft from bedroom wing to bedroom wing and about 50 ft from the front glass wall to the back kitchen window.
@@dometastic you have a great layout. My florida gulf little lot didn't give me a wider option that 40 ft x 75 ft to stay above the flood zone. As much as I would love to do as much hands on as you are doing I'm more interested in moving in to enjoy retirement. Looks like you are in snow country which is exactly what I've had enough of.
@@doclees11 We would have loved to have someone else do the work and move in quick. :) Unfortunately we need to save money by doing it ourselves (we couldn't get a building loan on something so different) AND it is super hard to find contractors that are willing to do something round. Goodluck on your build! It is an adventure even if someone else is swinging the hammer!
@@dometastic exactly on the contractors. One contractor that builds million dollar homes on pillars said he wouldn't know how to estimate a round house. None of these guys heard of time and materials? I'm lucky enough to have a master plumber brother and a cabinet maker willing to make the trip(paid) to FL. It's a start. Never thought that would be an issue. My issues have been with county flood zoning employees that were clueless.
this is super cool information! Can’t wait to see your finished home! I am curious about your experience with Monolithic Dome Institute. What were the costs like for all of the drawings? Did they work with you to get permits and stuff? Also, how do you go about getting financing for such an unconventional build? I really hope these kinds of homes become more mainstream; they seem super cool and actually practical.
Oh boy... I feel like I need another video to answer your questions... or to hang out and have coffee for an hour! 😂 I will break these up a little and encourage you to go read my blog because I have put all the down and dirty details there...although be prepared to spend some hours. Monolithic was great to work with once you start the process by doing a feasibility study. If you just send them questions before that I didn’t get much of a response. I think they get a lot of tire kickers and they are booked with jobs. They do not help you with permits. My advise is to go to your town armed with information about monolithic domes BEFORE you buy land to build. We did it when we had land picked out but hadn’t made an offer yet. We showed them the land we were considering and all the info about the dome and asked if it would be a problem. We talked to all the departments. You can find out if they will require stamped engineering. If you will need stamped engineering find out next from your state how hard it is to get a structural engineering license if the engineer is out of state. The guy monolithic sends you too is licensed in like 20 states already so maybe you will luck out!
Costs... this is going to be dependent on where you are located. Costs vary widely state to state. Full disclosure, we live in one of the most expensive states with high taxes etc. The plans from monolithic in 2017 when we started this were (I think) about $4500. I would have to go back and look though our records for an accurate number though because it was so long ago. This included the feasibility study and completely custom standard construction documents working with their designer. We had so many revisions and it took months. The site plan (this is super location specific and includes... soil tests, perk tests, septic staking, as built, engineered septic design and complete design of our specific house onto the land) was about $4000. It is important to note that the surveyor we chose was cheaper by about $2k than others because he had done the subdivision of the original farm and still had all the files. He did not need to create everything from scratch. The engineering is were everything blew up for us. We had to hire two firms. The experienced guy was about $2300. The local company was just about $10k by the time they were done.😳 The original quote was $6k. That’s another thing about building a custom home. It is no joke that things run over all the time! Towards the end of the engineers involvement with the build we flat out told them that there could be NO MORE OVER RUNS! They had budgeted a certain number of hours for each stage of their involvement but consistently went over and it all added up with us getting bills for another $800 etc etc. Eesh! Big take away from building is that quotes are not the actual final cost... it is just the company giving you what they think it will cost unless they specifically state that it won’t go over. I have never had something come back less than quoted.
Financing is another hard one that really depends on your situation. If you live in an area with other monolithic domes I think it would be easier. We were not able to get a construction loan (the main reason we are doing most of the build ourselves). We did get a loan to cover the shell construction through a local farm credit bank. They used property we already owned as the collateral but couldn’t give us more than 75% of what our land was worth because they are required by law to use comps sold within 6 months. They stretched it a bit and went a year. All that was acceptable to them were old geodesic dome homes in our area that had sold for the price of the land. The side effect of the government stepping in after the housing collapse in the 2000’s to regulate banks. They were stopping predatory lending but collateral damage are the unique houses. I have heard that sometimes banks will use other concrete or unique homes but that wasn’t our experience. They were stuck on it being round. The rest of our money is savings (sale of another house we fixed up and sold) and out of pocket. We will end up moving in before the house is done to save all the monthly expenses related to renting. It is not a one year and done build for us. It is a long haul build that we slowly do ourselves.
@@dometastic wow thank you so much for all your advice! I have been reading through your blog and now I’m really excited to keep following your journey! Financing is just making me hesitate a lot about building my own dome home. I’m hoping to save up enough in the next 5-10 years to pay in cash for a really basic build. You’re such a great resource; thank you!!
@@adelehare8495 yeah, financing is a huge stumbling block for most people. We started saving to do this 10 yrs ago. 😬 There are banks out there that will lend (usually small local ones that don’t resell their loans) but it requires a lot of calling and being turned down. I did write all about that in the blog. Our bank specializes in local agricultural loans and unusual properties. Like off grid etc. Don’t expect a warm reception from any of the big national banks. I actually found (after I had given up) ours because a person I am connected with in Ohio built a monolithic and told me about their experience. I just looked it up and found they had a local chapter of the credit union here. Mine is Farm Credit East.
I will add a comment here with the prices spiking for steel rebar... I struck me that we used about 5 tons of rebar in total between the footer, stem wall, ring beam and dome... just something to keep in mind as prices seem to like doubling these days...
Thank you for sharing. What coating are you using on the exterior so that the concrete holds up to the elements?
Great videos and great project. Thanks again.
I just saw your comment, sorry for the delay! The exterior isn’t concrete. At least not yet. The exterior is the airform. The airform is made from single ply pVC roofing material. It’s the same stuff that they use for commercial flat roofs. This is fine for 20 yrs as is. We will need to coat the exterior in something else before the 20 yr mark. If we can afford it we have decided to coat the exterior in concrete and then lime wash it.
How were your Blueprints made? What CAD Drafting program did you use?
These were made by Monolithic when we worked with their draftsman. Not sure what program she uses.
If you would be up for It, I would love to see what your word picture was like. I am currently working on mine and would love to see a baseline example. www.monolithic.org/plandesign-residential/a-word-picture-how-to-design-your-own-dome-home
Mine will be mostly underground as well which has its own challenges.
I will have to look for it! I know for sure that it is quite different than what we actually built.
How much did it cost to build over all at what square footage?
Your cost is going to vary by location and how much you do yourself vs. hire and what materials you use to finish it. Sorry to be vague but it is really site dependent. We hired South Industries to come out and do our shell. It was $72 a square foot for their part. Ours included the air form, ring beam, floor tension beams, the exterior shell, all materials and labor included. (as well as everything related to them coming to our site to work for 6-8 weeks) This does not include any site work, foundation... other than the ring beam, land, concrete floor or any labor or materials related to finishing the dome other than the plain shell itself. I have heard that it can be more like low $60's per square foot if you go with a single dome and are not over 2000k miles from them like us. Monolithic has a feasibility study that helps you figure out how much it will cost you to build. It does cost about $500 but that is applied to the cost of your plans. Here is the link to their designing process where you figure out what you want, need and can afford. This is where we started after we bought their Dome living book. www.monolithic.org/feasibility-residential
@@dometastic Thanks but what's your total square footage you paid for so I can do the numbers? Your doing some of it yourself so I would assume housing sqft costs are not what you actually paid. I know price varies greatly depending on location but ball park numbers help for planning budgets overall.
@@dustinjeffries526 Our house is 4 domes with a total square footage of 2735. We have done everything ourselves except what I listed above. That hired out part for the shell was $72 per sq ft. The only additional thing in the whole build (so far) that we hired someone to do is to pour the slab floor. That cost us an additional $7k. I have no idea what the livable finished build cost would be if we had a builder doing the whole thing.
What state are you located in?
We are in Connecticut
I think it is strong enough x5.
We joke that the footer and foundation was designed for a parking garage not a house. 😂 We think the engineers were compensating for not fully understanding the structure. 🤷♀️
@@dometastic It all depends on the soil/potential settlement, and they just did not want to sharpen the pencil - because there is not enough in this job for them to do that. If any project would justify very little rebar, it would be a dome.
@@dometastic We had the same with ours. It costs the engineer nothing to make it way stronger than it needs to be and he sleeps better at night. I did fight him on a couple things, such as he specified all #5 rebar. I asked him if he ever hand rolled #5 rebar? He had not, but that wasn't his concern. It wasn't until I asked him to show me the calcs justifying #5 rebar that he agreed I could switch to #4 rebar, but then he increased the number of pieces by 50%.
@@SimonHomeintheEarth Ours made us put #5 in the footer but everywhere else it was #4. There is a HUGE difference working with #5! Our plans originally called for all the rebar to be epoxy coated. We pushed back on that. We are not near the ocean (its 40 miles away as the crow flies) and the property isn't wet...we are at the top of a hill. The rebar supplier was confused why we needed it so I researched a bit. My research said that coated rebar is typically used in bridges and overpasses when adverse conditions are expected. (salt water and/or always wet) The engineer was like yeah.... well it is better than uncoated but I guess you don't have to do that since it won't be subjected to excessive moisture or salt. That is one of the reasons we joke about it being designed like a parking garage or bridge.
Lol free plans. You just saved someone $500 to $1500 for the plans
If only it worked like that! 😂 Maybe somewhere in the world a building department would accept blurry, drawn on plans (specific to our airform) that you can’t read the fine print on but I am guessing if they do…you probably didn’t need to submit plans in the first place.