I hope that by “do-it-yourself” you don’t mean I should do it MYself, but it’s a great idea. (Photo courtesy of WikiHouse.)
A London-based design team has come up with DIY designs for “WikiHouses,” which let would-be home constructors download plans and “print” the components themselves rather than buying them in a factory. In practice, I am pretty sure I couldn’t build a house even if all the parts were made for me. But in theory, this looks really cool!
The WikiHouse software, which is free, produces the CNC (computer numerical control) code to print all of the home’s components out of wood. Users can take the codes to a CNC workshop if they don’t have an appropriate machine (which they probably don’t), and can also adapt and improve the open-source software. Some of the designs even fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and don’t need to be nailed or screwed together. This is one of those things that looks so cool and is so exciting and then you think, well, could anyone actually do that, and how much would it actually cost, and where does the toilet go? We imagine someone’s thought of that — maybe they could come over and put it in for us. In fact maybe they could do a lot because this looks really hard, as if the Y in DIY stood for, “Yeah, you actually have to kind of be really good at this kind of shit to pull this off.”
