DAVID: Your adventure in “Twelve by Twelve” is part of a long tradition of restless Americans. In early America, Francis Asbury never even owned a home and traveled throughout his adult life, staying in other people’s homes. John Steinbeck traveled in a pickup truck equipped with a little camper. Thoreau famously lived in a tiny … Read more
This week is the 4th anniversary of Earthbag Building Blog. The growth in readership and content has been amazing. Web traffic on our blog has tripled in the last year! There are now 882 blog posts and over 4,300 comments. Thanks for your support. We’ve clearly hit a tipping point. There’s enough variety of content … Read more
New FEMA flood insurance regulations are going to have a huge impact on homeowners who live along US waterways. Robert Rash (see below) says these regulations will impact 40% of Americans. Keith Haley, a former weather forecaster who has lived in his current home 47 years and never been flooded, is being required buy FEMA … Read more
I’ve been reading about the building boom going on in Wyoming and the Dakotas from all the oil and gas exploration. There’s currently a severe shortage of affordable housing in the area. But the climate is very harsh and so conventional earthbag building is not so practical. We’re always searching for faster, easier, lower cost, … Read more
I posted an idea for Insulated Earthbag Foundations for Yurts at Instructables.com. One reader who left a comment liked the idea, but needed a simpler design so he wouldn’t have to get a building permit. Here’s an idea for a very simple design that might get around building codes. Stack one course of earthbags in … Read more
Test description: Shear strength of plastered 4′ x 4’/ 1.2 x 1.2 m bag wall (15″ / 38 cm thick) of weak cohesive soil with barbed wire; Materials: solid poly bags, tamped subsoils of silt and clay, lime and earthen plaster Abstract: Earthbag is a growing sustainable building technique that is increasingly desired in the … Read more