Holladay, 54, has spent the past 10 years building an earth-sheltered tire house into the side of a hill on his 30-acre 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 Solar Survival Architecture Inc., based in New Mexico.
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 High School, said, "if I was going to teach environmental science, maybe I should practice what I preach." The house is something that 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 by the sun during the winter. Holladay estimates that he has 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 that 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, as Holladay's is.
