Builders Without Borders assisted with creating this Earthbag Foundation for the first strawbale house in Haiti. Many of the bags were sewn from slavaged tarps, the bales were compressed by hand from local rice straw, the roof trusses were partially built from used wooden pallets, and the floor and plaster is earthen.
From NaturalHomes.org: This is pattern No.74, ‘Animals’. Create a piece of protected common land where animals are free to graze with grass and trees and water. There is balance to this pattern worth considering for both the individual and the community. These are Danish geese at ‘Land of Legends’, a partly inhabited model Iron Age … 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
Many of our readers are dreaming of building a small, efficient, sustainable home that requires some sort of heating. A wood-fired cookstove is a good multi-functional option for heating, cooking and water heating. You may be able to save money by buying a smaller cookstove. Or consider a used stove of good quality because they … Read more
I want to encourage people to put a lot of time and effort into developing an effective building plan, and I think Cliff’s approach, described below in his words, is the right one. We’ve had an ongoing email discussion for months. Numerous ideas from discussions with Cliff and others have found their way into this … Read more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCZnG5lGNS8&feature=related Most earthbag builders buy low cost subsoil and have it trucked to the building site. There are lots of advantages to buying soil, including having the soil dumped right where you need to save labor and speed construction. But what if you can’t get low cost subsoil or other suitable fill material? For instance, … Read more