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…
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…
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…
In this post I would like to share a list of the resources we have used for building the earthbag house. I’ll update this page as we continue the project, so check back later or sign up for my newsletter at the end of the post to be notified when I add something new!
Papercrete? What’s that? Papercrete is a mixture of paper and Portland cement. It has a light, spongy, airy feel and it’s a great insulating material!
We install doors and windows a bit differently in an earthbag home than in a normal house. Watch the video below where Lee explains how it works, and enjoy the slideshow afterward which shows the doors and window frames in the earthbag house we are building:
A few weeks back I wrote a post about the rainwater cistern we’re building. We’ve made a lot of progress since then! My newest video shows the cistern from dream to (almost) done! This cistern, made of earthbags like the rest of the house, will be the primary source of water for the house. We’ll…
Protecting the House from Cold and Moisture One of the major things to consider when building a house is how to protect it from moisture and temperature extremes. Here’s a video I filmed (a couple of months back now) on how Keith protected the foundation of the earthbag house from the elements using natural and reused building…