Adding Character and Style to Your Home

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It’s not difficult to customize stock house plans to match your style preferences. To get ideas it’s helpful and fun browsing good websites for pleasing design details: trim, colors, interesting uses of natural materials, window treatments, roof details and so on. Here are some of my favorite design sites that feature the beauty of natural … Read more

Jesse’s Earthbag Slider

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Jesse Loving reviewed my upcoming earthbag book and told me he thinks his slider is simpler to build and better than my favorite slider. Today he sent the details on how to build his slider. It’s a single sheet of 14 gauge steel: 20″ x 16″ One 4″ 90 degree bend along 20″ axis, making … Read more

Earthbag Building Preserves Forests in Nepal

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One of the major reasons of deforestation in Nepal is cutting down tress for wood for construction of buildings. Not only in the urban areas but also in the rural area, where wood availability is abundant, within the vicinity of community forestry, the overuse of wood creates pressure to degrade forest land. The massive or … Read more

Halcyon Times Dome Home

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“Three long months… 2,000 sandbags, 4,000 nails for closing the bags, 90 cubic yards of lava rock, 4 miles of barbed wire, -40 lbs. of combined weight-loss & 37 cans of Cattle Drive Chili… we have completed construction of our dome home.” Halcyon Times blog Note: They used scoria (lava rock) as fill material.