Dirt Cheap Housing Advice

Here’s an email from one of our readers (abbreviated for ease of reading). I just had a few questions about building an earthbag home, and I hope you can get me pointed in the right direction. First off, I’m broke, so these questions pertain to me saving up for my future home. My dream home … Read more

A Sad but Educational Footnote

In 2005 there was much publicity and delight regarding a lovely earthbag clinic built in a small town in the Philippines. This was a project of Illac Diaz and several organizations there. You can see the finished building below. Since then it has been privately reported that the building has fallen into disrepair. Some photos … Read more

Low-cost Multipurpose Minibuilding Made With Earthbags

One of the most practical structures on a small farmstead is a multi-purpose garden structure that can serve as a storage shed or cool pantry above ground, or as a root cellar or storm shelter below ground. You can build this multipurpose structure for about $300 using earthbag construction (bags filled with earth and stacked … Read more

Earthbag Rootcellar

Here’s a real nice earthbag/ferrocement rootcellar plan from Karl in the Missouri Ozarks. It is 8’ across, has 2’ of soil on top and beautiful stonework in front. Great job Karl! Karl describes his rootcellar in more detail: The U-shape on the top of the bags is a row of cement beam block that will … Read more

Eccentric Aesthetics

According to an article entitled “Eccentric Aesthetics: DIY Eco-Friendly Earthbag Homes” posted at dornob.com, the phrase “form follows function” has morphed in meaning over time and is, perhaps rightly, open to interpretation. One interesting extension of this idea is that the form of a building can follow the functions of its constituent parts – that … Read more

Earthbag Cisterns

Since water is vital to life, and there is increasing scarcity of clean drinking water in much of the world, it makes sense to store this precious resource and use it wisely. Earthbags in combination with ferrocement offer a number of interesting alternatives for storing water. Three different methods are shown below. www.flickr.com/photos/10349013@N02/2798383930 www.flickr.com/photos/11222150@N02/1082496465 http://earthbagplans.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/earthbag-cistern/