Over the years we’ve profiled thousands of affordable and sustainable housing ideas that include affordable homes made with natural building materials, earthquake and hurricane resistant housing, renewable energy, appropriate technology, permaculture, and on and on. In fact, we’ve covered almost the whole range of homesteading and sustainable living topics in addition to our main focus on natural building. We’ve done this because all these things are so closely interconnected. How can you have a sustainable home without a sustainable toilet, a renewable energy system and home garden? How can you build a sustainable home without affordable land? Most affordable land nowadays has depleted soil, so how do you improve degraded land to support a homestead?
Now we’re raising the bar. Kelly, his wife Zana, our friend Luke Anthony and myself have been brainstorming ways of taking our Natural Building Blog to the next level. This process included hours of exchanging emails — sharing our hopes and visions — to make our blog even better and more effective.
The problems in the world are truly staggering – seemingly insurmountable. But at the same time, our research has uncovered thousands of low cost, simple, practical solutions that can be put into wide use right now. This gives me and many others a great deal of hope for the future.
Our Natural Building Blog now has over 2,700 blog posts on low cost, sustainable, often world changing ideas all organized on one site for free. Our blog is becoming a veritable LIBRARY of practical know-how. Please let us know if you have suggestions for future improvements.
Here’s the list of recent upgrades we’ve made to our Natural Building Blog:
– Mobile device friendly: more and more people are accessing the Internet on smart phones and tablets and now our blog is more user friendly on those devices
– New subtitle text near top of page: Thriving Sustainably with Earthbag Building and Other Practical Solutions
– New text box below the header image that expresses the mission of our blog:
Our Mission: The Natural Building Blog is committed to providing free information that will improve people’s lives in a sustainable and affordable manner. This includes architecture, homesteading, gardening, appropriate technology, renewable energy, Permaculture principles, and ecological living.
– Clearer explanations of new topics to briefly summarize how and why they’re important to natural builders and homesteaders
We’re also planning special content for a weekly newsletter and a new PDF on the best places for natural builders and homesteaders to live. Let us know what you’d like to see.
Building a modern barn home in N.C. We want an open beam ceiling and standing seam roof. I need to find solutions for non toxic insulation to go between wood planks that span the joists and the underlayment and then standing seam roof. Can I send a photo to someone and a better explanation so that we may get some guidance? Need help asap, as our builder is installing the remainder of the joists in the next few days and will then be ready to close up the home to the elements.
Thanks!
You need to find an insulation supplier who can answer your questions. Search the web for green insulation, etc. We profiled a company about 2-3 weeks ago that sells glass wool insulation that’s nontoxic. It’s the biggest company of its kind in the US.
https://naturalbuildingblog.siterubix.com/recycled-glass-insulation/
Hello, I live in Florida and have a couple of tracks in west Texas. I have interest in a hybrid structure. Phase 1 would be a shipping container delivered on sight as a secure building. Phase 2 would be either berming or earthbags to stabilize temperature as it will be off grid. Possibly insulating roof something like your root cellar plan, with observation deck on top. Also I have enjoyed reading your Ebook.
That’s an interesting project. Codes are much more lax in Texas rural areas than Florida. Florida has some of the strictest codes in the world and that makes it very difficult and costly to build there.
Hi Owen and others,
Please translate in Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and French (last is for me ;o)) “at least” !
I would like a daily or weekly show TV or something in video.
Et voilà un grand boujour de France !
Amazing!
Hi Owen, Kelly and others,
Been coming to this blog for years on a daily basis.
Thank you for keeping it alive and informing us about new developments and showing examples of what can be achieved.
My only criticism – if I may
I have been on a mission for years to get the earthbag building method out to interested – or not ;-) organizations and people, but for some reason I am not taken seriously.
This technology should be more acceptable to the mainstream of society.
By this, I mean houses that look like they belong in fairy tales, will not advance the cause. Articles about an off-grid guy living alone in the wilderness, will not grab the youth that have an opportunity to live bond free at an early age.
We need to show more structures that look like a conventional house using earthbag, straw-bale, rammed earth etc. With all the positives that come with it.
We should strive to have whole neighborhoods built in an aggressive ECO manner, but look no different to conventional structures around them.
I feel this sector needs a modern focus and Owen, Kelly and many others are the best to show us how.
Thanx for this opportunity
Dion
We’re doing what we can. There are only so many projects available to the public to write about. Many people build their dream home and do not publicize it. So it’s a long slow process to bring this into the public consciousness. The same thing happened with strawbale building. Bit by bit it attracted architects, engineers and builders. That led to stories in newspapers and magazines. After twenty some years strawbale got into the building code. So I’m not discouraged at all. But I’m always amazed at how slow people are to change. We’ve written hundreds of stories, published free videos and tutorials, made lots of presentations, written books, etc. What else can we do?
i realy enjoy the blog ,i am not very tecey ,i do some times find it hard to find the subject .with the shearch box xx great work stive
Yes, the search function is a little difficult if you don’t know the exact words to look for. You may find it easier to search our site using a major search engine with “Natural Building Blog” in quotes.