Tired of boring housing?

LOUISA — Having hundreds of old tires piled up around your house normally isn’t a look your neighbors appreciate.

But the tire piles around Louisa County resident Randy Holladay’s dwelling aren’t just discarded junk — they’re the walls of his home and most of them aren’t visible from the outside.

Holladay, 54, has spent the past decade building an earth-sheltered tire house into the side of a hill on his 30-acre Louisa property. The 900-square-foot structure has three walls made of about 550 Michelins, Goodyears, Pirellis and more.

Each tire is packed tightly with 300 to 400 pounds of dirt, stacked on top of each other, then covered with mortar. Between every two tires are two Budweiser beer bottles, just to fill space, Holladay said.

“‘You will drink beer if you’re going to beat dirt into tires,’” he said he was told.

Joking aside, Holladay is serious about building a home from recycled goods — one that can sustain itself and in a small way, reduce the human impact on the planet.

Holladay bought the designs for the house from New Mexico-based Solar Survival Architecture Inc.

A company spokeswoman estimated that there are a few hundred earthships, as they are known, around the world.

Because of their design, the homes heat and cool themselves naturally. The sun’s warmth is captured in the home during the winter and kept inside by the insulated layers of tires and bottles.

In the same way, the earth protects the home during the summer from the sun and keeps it cool.

The homes rely on the sun and wind for power, and collected rain and melted snow for water, which in some homes is recycled four times through a filtration system for everything from a shower to watering plants.

Holladay, an Earth science teacher at Louisa County High School, said, “if I was going to teach environmental science, maybe I should practice what I preach.”

The house is something Holladay said he’s always wanted. But what he wants most now is for it to be done.

Because he’s doing most of the work himself, it’s taken a lot longer than the couple of years he planned. Holladay has been building the house for 10 years, and living in it — or camping, as he describes it — for the past six.

He has electricity, but no indoor plumbing yet. He’s got a filter system for bath water and another for drinking water, which is collected rain water, but doesn’t have the drinking water system hooked up yet.

He takes a shower in a kiddie pool using a solar shower — a bag that hangs from the ceiling — to which he adds water heated on his wood stove. He gets his drinking water from a neighbor for now.

“It’s certainly an adventure,” he said.

Eventually, Holladay will have a well and septic system and cisterns to collect rainwater.

“As we create more and more problems on the planet, the house of the future really is going to have to take care of itself and [its] inhabitants,” Holladay said.

The tire walls took two years to construct, and he’s still not finished covering them with mortar.

He went to tire stores and auto mechanics to get old tires.

“They looked at you funny,” Holladay said. “But they were more than happy for you to take them away.”

The home’s fourth wall faces south and is made entirely of windows, allowing the home to be warmed during the winter by the sun. Holladay estimates he’s spent between $30,000 and $40,000 to build his home so far. But he doesn’t have a mortgage payment, he said, and a recent electricity bill was $30.

Louisa building official Paul Snyder said the county hasn’t had any issues with Holladay’s tire house so far.

“It’s definitely unusual,” Snyder said, adding that state building codes allow for alternative methods and materials when they’re used in an engineered design, which Holladay’s is.

“A house of this type is a good example of the flexibility of the building codes,” Snyder said.

Jay Gillespie, a neighbor and friend of Holladay’s for about a decade, has been helping with some of the electrical, plumbing and framing work along the way. The dirt for inside the tires came from the dug-out earth where Gillespie is building his own home. But that’s where he drew the line, he said.

“I didn’t want to help him with smacking tires,” he joked, referring to the arduous work of packing the dirt inside the tires by beating it with a sledgehammer until it was a dense mass.

Holladay said he’s experimenting with growing his own food. He’s got tomato plants and avocado and banana trees inside his house.

“Interesting” is how most people describe the house, Holladay said. He acknowledges that a tire house isn’t for everyone. His advice for anyone wanting a tire house is to think about the time it takes to build one if you’re going to do it yourself.

“Be careful what you dream, be careful what you wish for,” he said.