“Hello friends. My name is Morgan Caraway. My better half Mary Jane and I built an earthbag house near Asheville, NC (some info about this technique at EarthbagBuilding.com), a cordwood bath house and recently completed an earthbag sunroom addition. We also built our own yurt, set up a rainwater system, built our own micro solar electric system and have learned a lot about sustainable living in general.
DIY
Earthen Hand.com Regenerative Home Nearing Completion
“Imagine a home that truly takes care of its occupants while improving the surrounding environment using appropriate technologies. The Regenerative Home is intended to be the first prototype of this particular design and combination of technologies which can allow a Regenerative Lifestyle!
The Barrel Oven: A New Kind of Outdoor DIY Pizza Oven
The best ideas are immediately recognizable, and that’s certainly true with this amazing new barrel oven by Max and Eva Edleson. Here’s an excerpt from a book review about their barrel oven by Ziggy at Year of Mud blog.
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
Sheds for Farms and Homesteads
Easily overlooked and often underappreciated, the humble shed serves many purposes on homesteads and farms. Not only are sheds extremely functional, they are typically low cost, and fast and easy to build. Often they can be built in a weekend or two, easily modified or extended later, or even taken apart and the materials used for something else. To keep costs to a minimum, you can build with recycled materials or build with poles from a nearby forest. Sheds make good test structures, where you can try out new building methods at low cost and low risk to determine what works best for your situation. You can develop your skills on something small and simple, and then if it makes sense take on larger projects using what you’ve learned. Most sheds in rural areas are exempt from building codes, which is one less thing to deal with. While modern farms often have large, expensive sheds, for this article we’ll primarily consider small, less expensive sheds for do-it-yourselfers who are setting up a sustainable place in the country.
Cobblestone Architecture
“Cobblestone architecture refers to the use of cobblestones embedded in mortar as method for erecting walls on houses and commercial buildings. Cobblestone architecture was developed in the northeastern United States, especially antebellum western New York state. Masons that built the Erie Canal during 1817-1825 started building cobblestone structures about the time the canal was finished.