Earthbag building is more than ‘just a good idea’. It could save your life, your family’s lives and everything you’ve worked for. Maybe you’re new to the concept and not yet ready to build a home this way. You might want to start out with a storm shelter to protect against hurricanes and tornadoes.
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How Much Will My House Cost?
Lots of people ask us how much their earthbag or strawbale house will cost. Cost is a major consideration of any new home, and so it’s understandable why people want to learn more. However, many people don’t realize how many variables are involved. It’s the old “how long is a piece of string” question that makes it very difficult to answer. The following examples will help clarify what I mean.
Low Cost Twig Stoves
Don’t want to buy and carry fuel for your camping stove? No problem. These affordable twig stoves burn whatever is available – twigs, branches, pine cones, pine needles, wood chips, wood shavings, plant stalks, grass, dung, leaves, paper, cardboard or any other type of biomass. They only need a handful or so of fuel to boil a pot of water. That amount is easy to find even in most deserts. Twig stoves cook faster, produce less smoke and typically pose less of a fire risk than camp fires on the ground.
Two Amazing Trees
In the process of researching trees and plants for our tropical food forests, we came across two trees with extremely practical characteristics. Moringa, the third tree we’re focusing on, was covered in previous blog posts. Moringa is considered one of the most nutritious plants in the world and will play a pivotal role in our food forests.
Natural Building Blog in Top 100 Construction Sites
“Hello Owen, I’m writing to follow up about the list ConstructionManagementDegree.com has just published covering the Best Construction Sites on the Web. I’m happy to inform you that Natural Building Blog has been included! The whole list can be found here: http://www.constructionmanagementdegree.com/top-sites/
Earthbag Tornado Shelter
We always enjoy hearing about reader’s projects. A reader just sent me photos of their earthbag tornado shelter in Ohio. We’ve been encouraging earthbag storm shelters since the beginning of this blog, because they’re low cost, efficient, simple to build and can save lives. The links below explain in detail how they’re built.
“I wanted to show you a picture of the work in progress. It took us two summers to build by the way, we had lots of interruptions. We just made sure it was well covered when we weren’t working on it, and well secured for the winter that it didn’t have stucco on it and we didn’t have any problems doing it this way. We live in Southern Ohio so we will have to be very attentive at repairing any cracks due to the weather. We have one already that needs fixed. With the air flow inside the shelter and stucco on the outside hopefully it will dry out quickly if any moisture gets between the stucco and the bags. We will see how it goes.