As we reported the other day, Brian Waite’s straw bale vault kit in England is an excellent option. However, many owner-builders might prefer to build their own vaulted home from scratch using locally sourced, low cost materials so as to make any size and shape they want.
Arches
A Cautionary Tale
Sometimes people send us emails asking specific questions about their personal projects, and we usually try to help them as best we can. Not long ago we got the following email with several photos attached:
I came up with the idea of building my own dome here in south Morocco where I live. I got some refurbished polypropylene bags and decided to do a 5m diameter dome to provide a shelter for horse food and equipment.
I decided to use the soil from our garden which is very close to sea sand. Since this was an unstabilized soil, I decided to tie the bags very firmly at the top to prevent any sand from slipping out, and also damped the sand so it could be tamped better. I dug a trench down to half a meter that I leveled with double bags filled up with small rocks, and then started the courses of bags, with two barbed wire between each course. We went up to half a meter straight, and then started to corbel the bags inwards. We have been working for two weeks now in a team of four, and it’s getting quite high. I wasn’t planning on doing a loft, since there would be no use of it for me. I’m getting a bit worried as we are working at higher levels that the whole thing might collapse, so I thought I should give it a try asking your advice. It feels quite strong while working on it, but when tamping, you can really feel the strikes wherever you are placed up on the wall.
Nubian Vaults in Africa
The Nubian vault is an African technique for the construction of timberless vaulted roofs. The AVN (Association la Voute Nubienne), through its Program ’Earth roofs in the Sahel’, helps provide families in sub-Saharan Africa with comfortable, sustainable, affordable, homes. In a recent Newsletter from this organization, I was impressed by the statistics they provided regarding … Read more
Finca Luna Nueva Lodge Workshop
The Finca Luna Nueva Lodge in Costa Rica is a sustainable rainforest eco-hotel together with a certified organic biodynamic farm. They began farming in 1993, planting and harvesting organic ginger and turmeric. They just finished a workshop building an earthbag roundhouse, and plan to do at least one more. You can find out more about … Read more
Most Popular Earthbag Instructables
Instructables.com is one of my favorite sites and so I’ve been publishing how-to articles there for the last year or so. Here’s a list of the most popular Instructables on earthbag building. How to Build an Earthbag Dome Step-by-Step Earthbag Building How to Build an Earthbag Roundhouse How to Build Dirt Cheap Houses How to … Read more
All the Best Earthbag Content
For several years, Kelly and I have been filtering all the best earthbag content from the Web, writing extensively on all aspects of earthbag building and organizing the information for readers. There’s now an enormous amount of information available – so much that it’s difficult to keep up with everything. That’s one reason why our … Read more