We have a friend in Idaho who built a homearound his old single-wide trailer house, too. It looked like something you would pay someone to haul off when he first dragged it out to their property, and with some work, they were able to move in. The next time we visited, Don had started a small porch. Each time, he would start out with a deck or porch, then enclose it in and make into a room . Eventually, over the years, he added on so much that you would never even suspect that an old single wide mobile home lurked inside there somewhere. There was a small cedar mill in the same area, and people could pick up the ends from where they sawed the cedar logs into lumber. The machine would square off the ends of the round timber, and those were just waste that was left to be burned. I would load up my little pickup with as many as we could haul home, and we used them on the outside of the pole barn as siding. It actually looked like a log cabin when we had it finished. Bobby even made me a little window with a flowerbox on the outside of it !
I just discovered this amazing little dome house, and it is made out of foam concrete, called "aircrete". The video explains just how they make it, and the owner designed a fairly simple process. It looks like you can make the aircrete into just about any shape you want as long as you have the mold for it, so you would not have to make a dome home if you wanted one that was rectangular and more traditional . The dome homes are good to have in places where there are bad storms, and they have a much better chance of surviving a tornado or hurricane than a traditional house does. I remember reading about the old ways of making bricks by hand, and they used straw as a filler. This would have made the bricks lighter weight than just the straight clay bricks would be, and I think that it also helped to make the brick stronger. I wonder how it would be to add chopped straw into the aircrete ? It would stretch it even further and maybe make a house even cheaper to build, because straw is pretty cheap , at least if you live somewhere that grain is grown as a crop.