The Finished Earthbag House Tour
After 4 summers and countless hours of labor, the earthag house was finished and moved into. Since then, it has been performing well! Here’s the video tour of the finished earthbag house.
Earthbag House Update: Work in 2016
We’re long overdue for an earthbag house update! In today’s post, I’ll give an overview of what Keith has been working on this year. In upcoming posts, I’ll dive into more detail about each aspect of the project. Last winter, Keith had a job up in North Dakota. While he worked up there, Lee (Keith’s…
A Unique Adventure in Baños, Ecuador
The bright yellow house down in the green jungle valley below beckoned us. We were in Baños, one of the most popular tourist towns in Ecuador, walking up a dirt road off the tourist radar, beyond all the hostels, tour companies, and restaurants and into the surrounding farmlands. We had recently left our beloved Loja…
Laser Leveling in the Earthbag House
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.
Filling the Earthbags
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.
Earthbag Arches
One feature that Keith had designed into the earthbag house we are building is the arch. We have two arches in this house. The first arch is built into the support buttress on the north wall. Buttresses add strength to a straight wall and are required every 10 to 12 feet in earthbag homes with…
Earthbag Walls – DONE!
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…
Septic Tank!
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:
Diddling Bags for the Earthbag House
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…
Earthbag House FAQs
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…
Rainwater Cistern in Action!
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…
Quick Earthbag House Update
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…