Farm Dreams

Homesteading, Organic Gardening, How to Farm, Preparedness, Self-Reliance

Earth Sheltered housing/buildings

We are planning to build an earth sheltered home. The available information I've found so far is pretty dated. Please share resources and experiences you may have with building and living in earth sheltered homes.

Tags: building, home, house

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Permalink Reply by Deep Roots Farm on December 2, 2011 at 1:06pm

I recently attended the Northwest Permaculture Convergence and there were several workshops on eco/earth building. My favorite by far was the WOFATI building. Paul Wheaton was the presenter and his website is www.richsoil.com This style of home makes earth building easy and cheap. Plus he makes some really good points about NOT burying your house into a hillside. The other workshop my partner attended was the fibercrete building. This utilizes scrap items, taking them out of the waste stream and covering them with a concrete/paper mixture, similar to cob, but seriously stable. It also depends on where you live. What resources are available to you where you live? Will you need to truck in a large portion of materials to build your ideal home? Does that create a larger footprint than a conventionally built home? I've seen it around here, someone wants a straw bale house, we have straw around here (lots of it!), but the builder wants it trucked in from 500 miles away because its the "right" straw bale.

Just some things to think about.Good luck!

Marci

Deep Roots Farm

Moscow ID

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Permalink Reply by Jesse on December 6, 2011 at 2:18am

Wow, that's some cool stuff. And now I want to build one.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Stelzer on December 7, 2011 at 3:11pm

I want to second this resource. Paul has a lot of great info on his site!

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Permalink Reply by SowandSo on December 12, 2011 at 8:12am

Rammed earth is definitely an option. A friend of my does workshops in Great Britain but also has written a great book about it. If you want you can check it out http://www.rammed-earth.org/

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Permalink Reply by Kim Gates on January 6, 2012 at 3:46pm

For some great information and pictures search " Low Impact Woodland Home" built by Simon Dale. Looks like a Hobbit Home!

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Permalink Reply by NHF on January 12, 2012 at 9:17am

I'm really interested in doing some small domes with earth bags and living roofs. You can see what I mean here: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-an-Earthbag-Dome/