“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.
earthbag house
Emergency Earthbag Shelters for Pakistan
Two clever examples out of many possible solutions.
“We ended 2005 with a project in the earthquake-stricken district of Bagh, Pakistan to provide Improvised All Weather Rapid Shelters (IRAS). Your strong funding of dZi this year has allow us to jump on this project with oversight from dear friends on the ground in Pakistan. Dr Neena Jain and her husband Bill Rohs are strong supporters of the dZi Foundation and were instrumental in helping us open our girl’s safe house in Sikkim, India. They are now volunteering for Austrian Aid International in Bagh for the next six months.
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!
Joining Roundhouses and Other Shapes
I’m been saying for quite a while the easiest, fastest shape to build with earthbags is a roundhouse. Build one roundhouse and then add on later if you want to avoid debt. Adding a connecting space – two straight joining walls as shown above — is a simple solution for joining roundhouses. This simplifies roof construction since standard trusses can be used. Other options include reciprocal roofs, pole frame, etc. Using the connecting space as a greenhouse is ideal so you have at least some organic home-based food production nearly year-round.
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
Plumbing and Electrical Summary for Earthbag Houses
These topics have already been covered in various posts on our blog, but I’m pulling everything together here for easy reference. Our blog now has 1,460 blog posts and it’s getting more difficult to find things. For those building an earthbag home, the bottom line is plumbing and electrical is 99% the same as conventional construction. The few differences are shown here. Everything else you need to know can be learned from library books or pocket guides. I prefer simple electrical and plumbing pocket guides because they show only what you need.