Acmeville Tract Homes: 2,500 sq. ft., 4 bedroom, 3 bath, $250,000 ($2,000/month for 30 years, 20% down, plus insurance, title and closing fees, taxes, cookie cutter fee, and homeowner association fee). Your choice of three shades of beige and pastel vinyl siding. Hitherwood Hills Ecovillage: your choice of 100 homes (30 unique designs by Owen … Read more
This is part 2 about building lightweight, insulated vaults with earthbags. Lower courses are gravel-filled bags to prevent water wicking up in the wall. Above that are standard earthbags filled with subsoil. These bags could be stabilized with lime or cement if there’s risk of flooding. Upper bags are filled with insulation and tied to … Read more
Follow me for just a moment as I try to explain how everything we really need is right before us – often in abundance – if we choose to look carefully. I’ll limit this discussion to homebuilding, but the same is true with friendships, love, joy, etc. I’ll start this train of thought with subsoil … Read more
One key to affordable natural building is to use low cost, locally available materials. Look especially for what others don’t want – things like ‘problem soils’, dredgings, ‘wastes’. This brick making video was the inspiration for this blog post. It explains how a company in the Philippines uses abundant, locally available materials to make brick. … Read more
I love interacting with readers through email and the Comments section. In addition to helping readers, this interaction is a regular source of new ideas and inspiration. Here’s a recent example. A reader left a comment about the high price of mesh bags they encountered. My first reaction was “well, that was just one supplier, … Read more
Alternate title: How to Build an Earthbag House That Will Last as Long as the Pyramids. I can’t say for sure that the pyramids were built this way, but this video describes a reasonable theory of how the blocks of the pyramids were made with natural materials from the Giza Plateau – limestone, kaolin clay, … Read more