Here’s another beautiful custom home design by Whole Tree Architecture.com. We covered their work in a previous blog post on Whole-tree Building that was very popular and so I decided to expand on this topic some more. You can think of whole-tree building as maximizing the trees that nature gives us to create rustic timberframe … Read more
An inexpensive option to thick concrete floors. The diagram below is from the 1972 book “The Owner Built Home”, by Ken Kern. In this discussion Kern describes a lightweight 1″ thick fiber reinforced floor system that had been tested extensively in India. The system starts with a flat earthen floor surface that has been loosened … Read more
As one of the top natural builders who influenced the direction of my life, we’ll be discussing more of Ken Kern’s building ideas. This is the stuff that fueled my imagination and passion for affordable housing when I was a young man. It was obvious to me 35-40 years ago that modern building materials are … Read more
Yesterday’s blog post about building with juniper poles prompted me to write this blog post. Much like pallets, juniper and cedar wood is an underutilized resource, probably because these trees tend to be twisted, curved and often smallish in size. For natural builders they’re a free treasure. Juniper and cedar are rot resistant, extremely common … Read more
From time to time we answer reader’s questions. Here, numerous emails have been combined and edited for brevity. Rex: My goal is to learn to build houses with local materials in order to help people in my area build sustainable debt free homes. I’m in love with your Earthbag Lodge plan as I had previously … Read more
Reviews at Amazon.com: The quaint wooden house in Prickly Nut Wood is no fairytale concoction – it is an icon of the movement to combine ecology and ethics in design. –The Guardian Ben’s approach to building his house started with the materials. He selected the poles he wanted to build with and designed around them. … Read more