Dear Readers, Friends, and Loved Ones, Happy Holidays from Loja, Ecuador! When I wrote the first draft of this holiday letter, less than two weeks ago, I had no idea that a few days later I’d be on a flight to South America! Let me back up to the beginning of the year and…
There are a few key tools that Keith has used in the process of building the earthbag house which we have found extremely helpful and time-saving. One such tool is the laser level.
Just to clarify, the walls of the earthbag house have been completed! However, I thought you might enjoy some video footage of the process of building the walls. In this video clip, Keith is working by himself to fill the earthbags in place on the wall.
Well, after 7 months of mixing clay slip with screenings from the nearby rock quarry and pouring the mixture into sandbags left over from Hurricane Sandy, our bag-filling days are finally over! Yes, the earthbag walls—at least the earthbag part of them—are finished. Now we are covering them in papercrete and chicken wire and more…
One of the big milestones of building this house is the installation of the septic tank, which happened a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a photo of the tank in the ground with the leach field behind it:
Before we fill them with the earthbag mixture, we diddle the bags so that they make a better shape for the wall and the corners don’t stick out and mess up the papercrete and lime plaster that will later cover them. The typical way to diddle a bag is to fold in the corners and run…
Here are some questions we’ve received about our earthbag house project, and our answers to them. We’ll add more as the questions come in. Feel free to contact us and ask anything you want! General Questions About Our Project Q: What state are you building in? Answer: We are building the earthbag house in Eastern Kansas—an…
I think of everything we have done so far on the earthbag house this season, seeing the rainwater cistern in action excites me the most. We completed the cistern late last year and this year one of the first things we did was fill it up to test it out! No, we can’t fill it…
It’s September 17th, 2015…I thought I’d pop in with a quick update on our earthbag house project. We’re making slow but steady progress! One of the big blocks we’ve faced this year is the lack of extra help like we had last year. We have a part-time helper and Keith’s sisters both took time off…
Last year, making batches of papercrete involved filling a barrel with newspaper and water, and grinding it up by hand using a drill with a special attachment. CLICK HERE to see last year’s post about it. Using that procedure, we could only make relatively small batches of papercrete, and mixing it up that way always made…
As I showed in the video last week, during our 9-month absence the partially finished earthbag house began to deteriorate in some places. This week the primary tasks were to repair some of that damage and prepare to continue our forward progress. Keith rented a mini-excavator and dug some clay out of our pond, which…
We put the earthbag house project on hold for the winter and a large portion of this summer. It’s now August and we are back to resume work. Here’s what it looks like after a nine month absence: