I submitted my final house design proposal for the Shelters for All housing competition. As posted previously, I chose a bamboo and plastic bottle wall design that best meets the design criteria. Entry requirements called for a one page summary of the project, detailed time and cost estimates, and up to five pages of drawings. … Read more
Yesterday’s blog post on Production Earthbag Building using Rice Hulls introduced one method for building walls with rice hulls. As you can see from the drawing above, the construction process is very straightforward. This method uses a standard post and beam frame with posts set in concrete footers and beams attached to the posts with … Read more
Mike, in Texas, has been asking some interesting questions about wrapping a post and beam frame with tubes of rice hulls. He thinks this is probably the fastest way to build an earthbag house. He may very well be right. Conversations and blog posts like this one are my favorite. Here’s part of my email … Read more
“Hello, We want to add two rooms to an existing small older home, my question is: We want to build a straw bale home with pallets on both sides, the thought is to put up the straw bales, then put on earth/clay/mud on the bales. As we put the mud on we will put a … Read more
From time to time we answer reader’s questions. Zafra: We’re researching the possibility of acquiring cheap recycled concrete rather than having to pay for gravel for our foundation, but we’re concerned because we’ve read that concrete can wick water upwards to the earth walls. Owen: Good question. Recycled concrete will work fine if you break … Read more
The drawings above show how to join new earthbag walls with old ones using buttresses. Put barbed wire between every course in the buttresses and through the rest of the structure. In the short-term, the buttresses strengthen the walls and serve as benches and plant stands. Here is the two step building process: 1. Build … Read more