In last week’s post, I wrote my overview of 2015, looking back at what went well and what didn’t go so well. This week I share my goals looking forward to 2016. Following the basic format outlined by Chris Guillebeau, I write down the major goal categories and set several specific, measurable goals for each….
My 2015 started with a cold snap in Fort Collins, Colorado. Keith and I had just brought our motorhome to Colorado and we were still settling in, with the heaters all running full blast. The excitement of living in a great town and the prospect of soon finishing not one, but two books I’d had…
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.
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…
I had an exciting day yesterday. It was unseasonably warm for Veteran’s Day—71°F and partly cloudy, but terrifically windy! Day before yesterday my sister-in-law, Denise, and I had spent all day plastering the walls of the earthbag house with papercrete. So yesterday I thought maybe I should take a few photos of our progress. With my camera…
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…
I’ve recently heard from a couple different African American readers of my book, one of whom asked me about racial issues in Ecuador. I’d like to share our correspondence so that others who have similar questions will have an answer. I hope it helps someone! My reader wrote… “While you mentioned a great many things…
What makes Cuenca such a magnet for expats? Although most of my Ecuador posts and my book are about Loja, where we lived in 2014, Cuenca is by far the more popular choice among expats. I think there are several good reasons for this. We spent nearly a week in Cuenca (though I was out…
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…