Progress on the Barn / Garage

barninterior

In the above photo you can see how the chicken coop (the A-frame shape) has been integrated into the barn design. The idea behind this whole grouping of functions was that you would be able to walk under roof directly from the house through the mudroom, into the garage and then either into the chicken coop or the recessed pantry.

You can tell that the skylight over each bay provides lots of open light. The space under the barn siding will be sealed up with mortared stones, so no wood will touch the soil anywhere. There will be a sink just to the left of the chicken coop that the hydrant will spill into.

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The Pantry/Root Cellar

The pantry/root cellar under construction.
The pantry/root cellar under construction.

After finishing the chicken coop described in yesterday’s post it was time to start work on the pantry/root cellar portion of the complex. I hired an excavator to dig out part of the hole and give me a head start on the project. While he was here with the machinery he also leveled an area for the rest of the building, dug an extension of the water line so we would have water next to the chicken coop, and brought in road base for inside the barn.

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New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com

The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information.  I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more

Stepped Earthbag Foundations

One of our readers requested information on how to build on sloped terrain. They want to minimize excavation work. The drawing above shows how to build an earthbag foundation in ‘steps’. The basic process involves: 1. determine the slope of the land: change in elevation (‘rise’) over horizontal distance (run), expressed as a fraction (example: … Read more