New ways to construct a house (in less time and money)

New materials and methods are giving multiple options to build a house quickly and with less money in comparison to RCC structures. Let us look at some of the developments.

Glass Fiber Reinforced gypsum (GFRC)

GFRC panels are used extensively to build walls, floors and staircase. Traditional brick walls consume materials - bricks, sand and cement. And significant labor and many months timeline is needed to build a house. All that is cut short by using the GFRC panels. Doors and windows can be cut-out precisely in these panels. Concrete is poured in the pockets of GFRC panels to make it strong. Use of steel reduces as the weight of the total structure is grossly reduced, so steel is mostly needed as reinforcement to carry gravity loads. Since no plastering is needed, cement’s use drastically reduced. The house will be ready in a matter of 3-4 weeks. Watch the video in which civil engineers from IIT Madras demonstrate the making of a GFRC panel built house. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUQEUcB7cMM)

Pre-fabs:

This is more of assembly at site since most of the construction is done at the factory. If you need to build a kiosk or a bunk house, you don’t have to construct it, rather you buy and get it installed in a weekend. You can get it moved to another location if the situation demands it. Sintex on the sellers of these pre-fabs.

Source: http://www.sintex-plastics.com/prefab/prefab_usp.htm

Bamboo house:

This is innovative thinking in making use of the bamboo to build structure of the house. If bamboo can be used in making a ladder which easily holds loads of a person or two, why not extend the use of it and build column structure to carry gravity loads? Yes, sure. There are many houses built that way to prove the reliability of this method. For your next farm house or sun-shades on your roof, you can try this by calling companies like Wonder grass (http://www.wondergrass.in/).

Source: http://www.wondergrass.in/

As the cost of housing is ever increasing, search for alternative methods for low cost housing will also increase and one can expect lot more new things happening in this segment.