A young system analyst from Brazil managed to save about half the cost of building a two storey brick house, by doing all the work himself, instead of hiring a professional construction crew. With absolutely no construction experience behind him, he turned to YouTube tutorials and advice from family and friends.

33-year-old Evandro Klimpel Balmant and his wife Ane Caroline de Jesus Balmant, 34, live in a beautiful 200 square-meter house that they built themselves, in Almirante Tamandare municipality, a metropolitan area of Curitiba, in Brazil. It took three long years to raise the house from the ground up, and they still have the upstairs to plaster, but they say it was worth the wait, especially since they manage to save around 50% what a house this size would have cost to build with a construction company.

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Photos of a small house on the Vietnamese island of Hon Thom have getting a lot of attention on social media for its unique fence made exclusively out of discarded old television sets.

The unusual house is reportedly located on the road to Hon Thom cable car and is very popular with tourists, for obvious reasons. After all, it’s not every day that you pass by a fence constructed out of old, but somehow intact television sets. How those old cathode ray tubes haven’t been shattered by strong winds or vandals is a mystery, as is the reason why the owner decided on this particular material for the fence. Perhaps a television repairman lives there, or perhaps someone just hoarded them and one day decided to put them to good use. Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that the fence is a good way to attract attention.

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A 354-foot-tall waterfall flowing down the side of a futuristic skyscraper sounds like the kind of thing you would expect to see in a big-budget sci-fi movie, but it’s actually a sight you can feast your eyes on in real life, if you’re ever in the Chinese city of Guiyang.

A video of the stunning waterfall, with stream of water rippling in the sun and creating a perpetual rainbow in front of the  Liebian International Plaza skyscraper, went viral on social media this week, leaving millions of people around the world scratching their eyes. Measuring 108 meters (354 feet), this technological wonder is believed to be the highest artificial waterfall in the world.

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Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years.

A builder by trade, Levon was drawn to the rock the moment he started hammering away at it with a chisel. His wife Tosya, who now runs his underground temple as a tourist attraction, says that he was motivated by a series of visions and dreams in which a mysterious voice told him to keep digging. It said that Levon was going to create a He listened, and worked a whopping 18 hours a day, every day, for 23 years. At first, progress was slow, as he had to chisel his way through solid black basalt, but a few meters below the surface, he reached softer volcanic stone which made his work much easier.

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The Russian city of Sochi is known as a popular seaside destination and for having hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. But what most people don’t know about the seaside city is that it is home to a special type of residential complexes – so-called “Russian Favelas” made up of Soviet-era car garages converted into 3, 4 even 5-storey homes.

Having a garage built into a house or apartment building isn’t unusual at all, but while in the US they are considered annexes to the main building, in the Russian city of Sochi, it’s the other way around. The garage is the main building upon which owners have built several storey residential annexes which they then rent out to migrants or families too poor to afford conventional homes. In order to avoid having to register these bizarre residential buildings as actual houses and paying higher taxes, owners maintain the ground floor as garages, preferring instead to build as many storeys on top of them as legally possible to maximize their profits.

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A farmer from Southern China’s Jianxi Province managed to move his entire house 40 meters away from the site of a road construction site, by using an impressive system of wooden sleepers and winches.

Gao Yiping had completed work on his three-storey house in Zhouxi Town in 2014, and he and his family had only lived in it for just over a year when local authorities notified him that it was standing right in the middle of a new road construction site and needed to be demolished. The state would offer some compensation, but Gao, who had spent around 1 million yuan ($160,000) and several years building his dream home, just couldn’t bare the thought of seeing it demolished so soon. So, last year, he started searching for an alternative.

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The tiny house movement has taken off over the past decade as urban developers have had to find creative solutions to soaring property prices worldwide. James Law Cybertecture of Hong Kong has joined this trend with their newly released Opod Tube House, made from repurposed concrete pipe.

Hong Kong, one of the most populous cities on the planet, has been especially hard hit as home prices have shattered historical records for 12 straight months this past year. According to the Bangkok Post, an apartment sold this past November for HK 32,060 (USD 6,915) per square foot, making it the most expensive apartment per square foot in all of of Asia. This trend has forced over 200,000 people into tiny partitioned apartments, averaging no more than 62 square feet, and some are only able to afford individual caged beds. Government data shows a 9% increase in the number of households living in “inadequate housing,” including partitioned flats and industrial buildings.

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While most songbirds build small, discreet nests designed to shelter one clutch of eggs, the Social Weavers (Philetairus socius) of southern Africa build communal nests so large that they can pull down mature trees. Each structure can weigh over a ton, and range upwards of 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall, with over a hundred separate nesting chambers. Successive generations refurbish and reuse these compartments, often for more than a century.

Social Weavers utilize several different building materials, starting with a basic structure of woven twigs. They then line the interior with grasses and feathers and construct a 10-inch long, one-inch wide private entrance with downward pointing spiky straws to deter snakes. While a breeding pair will have a private apartment, most chambers house three or four of the birds at a time. The benefits of this lifestyle become clear in the context of the desert where temperatures vary dramatically.

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Science and technology progress so fast that something created only a decade ago will most likely feel like an antique to its present-day observers. This, however, is not the case with the ball-shaped houses in the Dutch city of Den Bosch: they resembled the set of a sci-fi movie when they were conceived in 1984 and remain as futuristic-looking to this very day.

Known locally as Bolwoningen, these bulbous homes were created as part of a Dutch experimental housing program launched in 1968. They were designed by artist and sculptor Dries Kreijkamp in the 1970s and the project was completed in 1984 along with another subsidy winner: the famed Kubuswoningen (cube homes) in Rotterdam, designed by Piet Blom. While the program was shut down the same year the Bolwoningen became a reality, this experimental housing complex continues to stand and remains as wow-worthy as the day it took shape.

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If you’re a diehard vegetarian who can’t bear the smell of cooked meat, or even the thought of living near someone who likes to consume meat, you’ll soon be able to move into a vegetarian-only apartment complex in Russia.

Veda Village, an ongoing construction project in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Russia, was designed for vegetarians looking to practice a healthy and ethical lifestyle in a community of like-minded people. The first and most important requirement to buy or rent an apartment here is to be a vegetarian. Clients will undergo interviews with sales agents, and if they fail to convince them that they are true vegetarians, their application will get denied. But a meat-free diet is not the only thing required to earn a place in Veda Village. According to developers, smoking and the consumption of alcohol in the residential complex are also prohibited.

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Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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A family in Forest Hill, Toronto, has taken their neighbors to court for copying the design of their multi-million dollar house when renovating their property, thus decreasing the value of their own home. They are asking for $2.5 million in damages.

It turns out you can’t just copy design elements of a house you like without suffering the consequences. Barbara Ann and Eric Kirshenblatt learned that the hard way three years ago, when they were taken to court by their neighbors, Jason and Jodi Chapnick, whose home they had allegedly used as inspiration when renovating their own property. The Chapnicks claimed that the defendants had fixed up their house to look “strikingly similar” to theirs, including using matching stonework the same shade of blue. They were asking for $1.5 million in damages, $20,000 in statutory copyright damages, $1 million in punitive damages, and for the defendants to change the look of their house.

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In the town of Ratomka, five kilometers from the Belorussian capital of Minsk, there is a house so spooky that some people try to avoid walking past it at all costs, especially at night. With skeletal hands coming out of the stone fence, devils decorating the roof and dozens of black skulls covering a domed structure on the property, the scariest house in Belarus is definitely a sight to behold.

Photos of the spooky house in Ratomka recently went viral in Belarus, with most people praising the owner for the bold artistic design. However, the only reason that the house even became famous in the first place was because people living in its vicinity had been complaining that it is too spooky. Some of them even filed complaints to the local authorities about it, claiming that the devils and skulls were scaring children and even adults walking by after dark, but they haven’t done anything about it yet.

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Yu Ermei, and 86-year-old woman from Jingdezhen, Eastern China, has spent around $900,000 and five years of her life building a “palace” completely decorated with ceramic pieces. Most people consider her insane for spending so much time and money on this project, but she says that her life would be incomplete without it.

When Yu came up with the idea for her unique porcelain palace, six years ago, her family thought she had become senile, but she tried to explain that this was her life’s dream. Jingdezhen is considered “China’s porcelain capital” and having lived here since age 12, the woman wanted to leave something behind in honor of the city that had shaped her existence. She had worked in the ceramics business for most of her life, first as an apprentice in a porcelain workshop, then as a worker in two state-owned factories, before gaining enough experience to open her own kiln and porcelain factory, which ended up making her a sizable fortune. This palace would be her way of giving back to Jingdezhen and a tribute to ceramics.

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Photos of a five-storey building in the Chinese city of Chongqing have been going viral on social media, for the simple fact that the building in question has a flat roof that also doubles as a road that cars actually drive on.

Before we go into details about this particular architectural oddity, it’s worth mentioning that Chongqing has a reputation for unusual architecture and infrastructure. Its terrain is mainly made up of hill slopes, and this lack of flat building space has basically forced architects and urban planners to think outside the box in order to come up with feasible solutions. Some of their most famous creations include a sprawling road interchange with 15 ramps going in eight different directions, 13-storey-high pedestrian bridges and the world-famous apartment building that has a train passing straight through it.

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