Building an Earthbag Tiny House Online Course

Morgan Caraway, of the Sustainable Life School, has informed me that his new earthbag tiny house class is online at https://sustainablelifeschool.thinkific.com/ He says that, “After over a year of hard work, the online earthbag tiny house course is live! It covers the entire construction of our earthbag tiny house from foundation to finishing. The class includes hours of professionally-filmed footage from our September 2019 workshop and illustrated documents with our best and latest information. The introductory price is $150 (50% off!) and there is a free preview available.”

I had a chance to review the class material, and I can say that it is quite thorough and covers most of the basics of earthbag building. Morgan has developed his own approach to some of the procedures, but the instruction seems to be quite sound. There are some 50 short video segments that describe the process from foundation to wall building to roof construction to the final plaster and even the earthen floor.

One aspect of Morgan’s approach that differs from most common advice for Earthbag construction is that he likes to use smaller 14″ X 26″ polypropylene bags, the same as common sand bags. This creates a wall that measures about a foot thick after plaster. The more common bags used for earthbag construction measure 18″ X 30″, yielding a wall that is closer to a foot and a half thick. These smaller bags are certainly easier to handle because they weigh only about half what the larger ones do and they can be lifted and placed on the wall without the use of a slider. This seems fine to me for rather small projects, but for more substantial buildings I still feel that the larger bags will create a more stable structure.

An an alternative to actually taking an earthbag building workshop and getting physically involved, this course offers great value.