From Liz: “The Ernas Women’s Centre is a group of 66 displaced women from all over Vanuatu who have settled in the Erakor peninsula. They have no jobs to pay their children’s school fees so they sell food by the road side. They have a business co op that supports them in earning, saving and getting micro finance loans.
Earthbag Building
Emergency Earthbag Shelter with Reciprocal Roof
Our blog has quite a few free emergency shelters for various purposes. All designs can be found on this blog using the built-in the search engine. Free detailed plans for these shelters are on our Free House Plans page. I’ll add this latest design there if it proves popular. Leave a comment below if you’re interested in building this earthbag shelter.
High Wind Damage to Homes
Earthbag building is more than ‘just a good idea’. It could save your life, your family’s lives and everything you’ve worked for. Maybe you’re new to the concept and not yet ready to build a home this way. You might want to start out with a storm shelter to protect against hurricanes and tornadoes.
How Much Will My House Cost?
Lots of people ask us how much their earthbag or strawbale house will cost. Cost is a major consideration of any new home, and so it’s understandable why people want to learn more. However, many people don’t realize how many variables are involved. It’s the old “how long is a piece of string” question that makes it very difficult to answer. The following examples will help clarify what I mean.
Earthbag Tornado Shelter
We always enjoy hearing about reader’s projects. A reader just sent me photos of their earthbag tornado shelter in Ohio. We’ve been encouraging earthbag storm shelters since the beginning of this blog, because they’re low cost, efficient, simple to build and can save lives. The links below explain in detail how they’re built.
“I wanted to show you a picture of the work in progress. It took us two summers to build by the way, we had lots of interruptions. We just made sure it was well covered when we weren’t working on it, and well secured for the winter that it didn’t have stucco on it and we didn’t have any problems doing it this way. We live in Southern Ohio so we will have to be very attentive at repairing any cracks due to the weather. We have one already that needs fixed. With the air flow inside the shelter and stucco on the outside hopefully it will dry out quickly if any moisture gets between the stucco and the bags. We will see how it goes.
A Sustainable Life
“Hello friends. My name is Morgan Caraway. My better half Mary Jane and I built an earthbag house near Asheville, NC (some info about this technique at EarthbagBuilding.com), a cordwood bath house and recently completed an earthbag sunroom addition. We also built our own yurt, set up a rainwater system, built our own micro solar electric system and have learned a lot about sustainable living in general.