Earthbags and UV Rays: A Reluctant Experiment

When I sealed the busted skylights on the Sky Bus with filled earthbags in the middle of July, I had every intention of getting back out there within a few weeks to paint over them, since UV rays are earthbags' greatest natural predator.  However, life being what it is around here, I didn't actually make it back to the land until last weekend, and I was worried about the state of the bags after so much time passing.  But I'm happy to report that even after almost three months of exposure, they were still intact;  the lettering was faded, but other than that they were fine.  I painted them a cheery yellow, since that was what I happened to have on hand, and now I don't have to worry about them again until spring.  I was also pleased to see that this method of skylight repair has apparently worked beautifully; there were no leak stains at all in the bus, even though we've had quite a bit of rain in recent months.

The other purpose of going out there last weekend was to deal with the pile of bags outside the bus.  I was able at last to get all of them either into the bus or into my Blazer to bring to my house, and this is a HUGE relief.  No more mountain of bags sitting on the ground!  And other than a very few at the bottom that had mildewed (which were the lowest quality bag I had anyway), they are all in good shape.

Earthbags in my mudroom, freshly unloaded from the Blazer.  A bit dirty, but intact.

Seeing how much I was able to accomplish in just a couple of hours out there inspired me.  My goal now is to get to the land one more time before it gets too cold and/or snowy, and finish what little rubbling of the trench there's left to do.  I'm hoping I can get one or two helpers to come out there with me and bring wheelbarrows, and then within a few hours, the trench can be completely filled and covered over with pieces of the old tarp that was previously protecting the pile of bags.  Any volunteers? I'll feed you and buy you a beer at Taos Mesa Brewing :) 

  

Earthbag Bus Repairs

A cool thing happened the other night.  I was on my way to meet the phenomenal Deonne Kahler at Taos Mesa Brewing to see a band, and the thought crossed my mind that I would run into my neighbors from the mesa there, Brenda and John, even though I hadn't seen them there or anywhere since last summer.  Lo and behold, I was right, and they filled me in about the earthbag dome they're building on Brenda and her husband Charlie's property, down the hill from Serendipity.  I also met a new neighbor, Diane, and it turns out she's from Montreal, which is where I was born.  The whole encounter really made me itch to get out to my land, but I had a problem to figure out first, one that I'd been procrastinating dealing with all summer.

At the beginning of June, I went out to my land and discovered that the last functioning skylight in the Sky Bus (the other two were gone and boarded up when I bought it), had blown off the roof and cracked.  If you're not familiar with the Taos mesa wind, that should put it in perspective.  The skylight was closed, and the wind was enough to open it, separate it from its hinge, and blow it right off the roof.

Bummer.

So I needed to decide how I was going to fix that before spending any real time out there, especially since the monsoon season has hit.  I finally sat down and gave it some thought yesterday morning, because I was going to go out there in the afternoon.  I had decided I was just going to Gorilla Glue a piece of tarp over the opening as a temporary solution, and was packing up to head out, when I had the sudden brilliant realization that I could use an earthbag instead.  Since my son was going with me, he could hand me buckets of dirt to fill the bag in place on the roof, and then just lay it down over the opening and tamp it to seal any cracks. 

So that's what we did and it worked great. 

I did lay a plastic bag liner over the opening first for added coverage.

It worked so great, in fact, that we decided to go ahead and do it with the other two missing skylights as well.  Since they were boarded up only on the inside, they still leak when it rains a lot.

Halfway through filling the second bag. 

The ugliest of the three.  Notice my lame attempt from last summer to seal it by inserting pieces of a sleeping bag mat.

Next time I go out there, I'll paint over the bags to keep the sun from eating them, and I think they should hold up at least until next summer.

Another thing I accomplished yesterday was to bring a bunch of the bags home with me.  They've all just been sitting there in a huge pile under a tarp, so I want to eventually get all of them out of there.  One of the benefits of having them at my house is also that I can get them all inverted before I actually start to build.

We stopped to visit Brenda's building site on the way out.  They're doing a 20-foot diameter dome just like ours, but they're using mesh tubing and they've got this very interesting DIY barbed wire they've created.  And John has come up with a brilliant bag-filling device with wheels.  I can't help but feel a little jealous that they've accomplished in a month more than it took me two summers to do (they're now about three courses above ground level), but on the bright side, it's inspiring to see and motivates me to start turning those bags inside out!

Shimming the Tree

Here's a confession which will give you a very clear understanding of just how "inexperienced" a builder I was before beginning my housebuilding project:  I didn't even know what a shim was.  In fact, even after I looked it up because it was referenced in the house plans I bought from Owen Geiger, I still didn't really understand the term.

It wasn't until I helped Aly hang her doors that I truly comprehended shimming.  Thank God our friend Jeremy (who helped me move the bus way back when) was there too.  Because while Aly at least knew what a shim was, neither of us was really prepared for the exercise in precision that hanging doors is.  Jeremy, however, is a construction guy (and a really great teacher, I might add).  He was very patient with our ignorance, and walked us through the whole process.  Because Aly's doorway wasn't quite plumb, we had to make shims, so I got to see exactly what they are and what they're for.  Pretty nifty.   Jeremy even let me operate his circular saw, a first for me.  Turns out I'm pretty good at it, but power tools still kinda freak me out.

Sorry for the crappy quality; these were taken with my phone.

 

My second experience using shims has come unexpectedly.  I bought a Christmas tree last weekend, and while installing it in its stand, I realized the trunk was too skinny for the screws that hold it in place, so my four-year-old's dad helped out by making four shims, one for each screw.

 
Useful buggers, shims!  You just never know where they'll come in handy.

Changing Seasons

The Fall Harvest Festival has come and gone, and life is slowing down a bit now.  The earthbag workshop went well, and was fun to do.  We had eight attendees, and they were all very interested and asked a lot of questions.

Photos by Enrico Trujillo

The trench is coming along nicely, although slowly.  So far I've only been able to put in a total of about five hours on it, but have managed to do around twenty feet, which isn't bad.  And it's fun work.  One thing I've realized lately is that there are distinctly two kinds of people:  those who love digging and those who hate it. Turns out I'm one of those who love it.

This Saturday I'm having a digging party, as I've had several people offer to help.  I really want to get the whole trench dug before the ground freezes, and I figure if a few of us spend an afternoon on it, we can make some good progress.  If you're in the area and want to come, please do!  If you're a non-digger type, you could just hang out and be a cheerleader :)

Five more nights at the Sky Bus, and then I'll be living in town again for winter.  It's been getting quite cold at night, and both Graeme and I are really looking forward to being in a warm house.  I've really enjoyed living as we did over the summer, but I'm also ready for a break.  And in addition to simply enjoying things like a bathtub, an oven, a refrigerator, and stuff like that, I'm also looking forward to taking time this winter to refine my plans, so that when we move back out to the land next spring, life will be a little more organized, and I'll be able to put most of my energy into building, instead of feeling scattered and stretched thin as I did much of this summer.

Earthbag Buddies

Aly and me in her outdoor kitchen.  Photo by Mary Longe.

One of the cool things that happened this summer is that I connected with Aly B, of Building an Earthbag Home in Northern New Mexico.  We had been following each others' blogs and emailing a bit, but then one day she walked into the cafe where I do most of my writing work, and I recognized her from the photo on her blog.  Since then, we've visited each other's places and hung out for barbecue (and had a bit too much fun at the Station Bar at KTAO Solar Center one night).  She even loaned me her truck for a couple of days when mine was in the shop. 

It's been great to have someone else to talk to about all this stuff that most people don't know jack about and/or couldn't care less about.  I mean, how many people want to get into a passionate discussion about gravity-fed water versus electric pumps? (Well, in Taos, probably more than the average place, but still.)

And then the fact that she's another single woman building a house on the mesa is a major blessing.  One thing I've found since I've started my project is the need for some men to try to take charge in subtle - or not so subtle - ways.  There is a LOT more I could say about that, but I'll refrain.  (If you're a woman, you're probably already quite familiar with what I'm talking about, and if you're a man, all I can say is it's not a bad idea to watch for the tendency to talk down to women and feel entitled to take control in some way under the guise of being "helpful."  Enough said.)

Anyway, Aly and I are doing a mini-earthbag workshop together tomorrow at the Fall Harvest Festival that I'm coordinating.  It will be at UNM-Taos' Klauer Campus, if any of you want to come out tomorrow. 

Working on this festival has been a LOT of work, but I feel pretty passionate about it because the focus is sustainability, and we're offering a bunch of different free workshops on things like solar energy independence, water catchment, adobe brick-making, just to name a few.

Aly and I are going to just give a basic introduction to earthbag building in our workshop.  We'll talk about why it's a good choice for owner-builders with little or no construction experience and limited budgets.  We'll show them the basic tools, and what scoria looks like.  We'll show images of finished earthbag houses.  I think it's going to be fun!

I also think, after this festival is over, I just want to go hide in a cave for about a month :)  Well, it won't be a cave, more like an apartment that I'm moving into at the end of the month, but same difference.  It's been a very active summer for me, both in terms of the physical labor of working on the building site and in terms of organizing this festival.  And a lot of other things too.  I'm ready for a break.  I'm still hoping to get the trench finished before winter, though, and will probably have a "digging party" around the middle of October.

But for now, I've got a festival to get through tomorrow, then moving the weekend after.  Miles to go before I sleep.

Diggin' It

On August 18th, I finally started digging the trench that will become the foundation for my house.  For those of you not familiar with rubble trench foundations, you can go here to read all about it.  Basically what I'm doing is digging a trench around the circumference of the domes that is 18 inches wide by 18 inches deep.  Then I'll fill it with about 6 inches of rubble consisting of rocks from around my property and then another 6 inches of scoria on top.  (Scoria is also what I'll use to fill the bags later.)  In the building plans it says that the first two courses of earthbags will then be double-bagged and will constitute the foundation of the house, with the top of the second course 6 inches above the pad, which will be finish floor level. 

However, Owen Geiger emailed me the other day suggesting that I raise the building site by adding two extra courses of earthbags, then later laying scoria up to finish floor height, which would then be about a foot higher. (He also posted about this process here.)This will help keep snow and rain from entering the house, and the insulating properties of the scoria will mean a toastier floor.

So I think that's what I will do.  However, that's a ways down the road.  At this point, I'm hoping to simply finish digging and fill the trench before the ground freezes.  

And speaking of freezing, the weather has shifted dramatically here in the past couple of weeks.  It's like summer just up and ended, BOOM.  It's been raining a lot, and it's gotten alarmingly cold.  I haven't been able to shower at the bus let alone dig my trench.  The plan now is that we'll be moving into town for the winter at the end of this month.  

I'm actually looking forward to it.  If it was just me with no kids, and the bus was enveloped, and I had an indoor bathing system set up, I think I could live in the bus for the winter, but none of those things are the case.  Also, I've begun to miss certain things.  When I first moved out there, I was afraid I'd really miss a bathtub; what I wasn't expecting is how much I miss having an oven.  I love to bake almost as much as I love to bathe, especially in the fall and winter.  Pumpkin pies, Christmas cookies, my eggnog cheesecake (which once snagged me a marriage proposal), all that good stuff.

I just hope the weather clears up enough for me to get some serious digging in before I move out.  I can still go out there and dig after I move, of course, but it's just not as easy as getting up at the crack of dawn and walking out to the building site.

I have to say I've really been enjoying digging.  There's something so primal about it, so satisfying.  I love seeing the bold outline of the circles begin to take shape.  It's actually hard to explain what's so fulfilling about it to me.  I keep trying to think of metaphors and the only thing that continually pops into my head is using a cookie cutter.  Making shapes out of a blob of dough.  This is kind of like that except at a much, ahem, deeper level.  I love the feeling of slicing down through the dirt with my shovel.

Also, there's something about going down into the earth that strengthens the sense of connection with it.  As soon as I had a few feet done, I had the irresistible urge to get down in the hole.  And it's a whole different perspective from there, quiet and solid.  
 

Of Mattocks and Muscles

I've always had a hard time - being a writer since practically birth it seems - keeping up with all the things I want to write about.  It's especially frustrating these days, because I write for a living so most of my writing juice goes to that, but now there's the added (huge) factor that I'm building a house.  There are so many things, dear reader, that I want to share with you:  the daily morning soap opera of the hummingbirds that gather and fight around the feeder I've erected, the gloriousness of my outdoor shower.   I want to wax rhapsodic about the directness, the immediateness, the unobstructedness of simply everything the land is showing me:  Wind.  Water.  Fire.  Earth. 

But what I'm going to do is tell you about a girl and her brick.

When I was around 18, I used to go out on Chimes Street in Baton Rouge.  It was a magical place, hard to describe.  It was just off the campus of Louisiana State University, a tiny little street with a couple of hip dive bars on it, but it deadended at what was commonly called "The Enchanted Forest."  Truman Capote reputedly lived on this street for a while, in a small apartment complex known only as "The Ghetto."  The best bar on this street, The Bayou, was featured in the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, the director, is from Baton Rouge).  Sadly, the Bayou has since burned down.

Anyway, my point - and I do have one - is that one night while wandering around Chimes Street and the adjacent neighborhood, I came across a heap of bricks in an empty lot and picked one up.  It felt really good to hold it, to feel its weight in my hand.  I carried it around all night, and I later wrote a poem with lines inspired by that experience:   "A girl and her brick/ has become a woman building."

It just hit me that I am now truly that woman in a way I was nowhere near imagining when I wrote the lines.  No, I haven't laid a single earthbag yet, but I've been mattocking sagebrush, having graduated from a garden fork and trowel.  And I looked in the mirror today and saw muscles.  Muscles! 

What could be more rewarding than seeing how every day I can spend a little more time smashing and pulling sagebrush, raking and wheelbarrowing, before I get too tired and have to stop?  I know there are a lot of people who start working out at a gym and stick to it long enough to experience the triumph of increasing their weights, losing 10 pounds, etc. - but this is so much more than that, because all of this means that at the end of a morning or evening of work, I can stand there and survey the site where my house will be.  That I will build.  On my land.  That is mine.

Almost all the sagebrush has now been removed from within the boundaries defined by the little hot pink flags, which were carefully placed by measuring the diameter of my domes and the length of the whole house.  I have to admit, I stand there long and just look, every time I finish for the day.  Yes. Yes. Yes.

And now, some photos from the buswarming:

My awesome friend Nicole, who owns this land with me and finally got to see it for the first time.  Here she is making a masterpiece with a Shiner cap and some sparkly string.

Richard, Kerry, and their kids.  Graeme and I got our first hands-on earthbag experience at their barnraising in Colorado, so I'm really glad they came, and their kids had a great time with Eliana.

Richard and Kerry brought me two tomato plants along with two hand-painted tires and dirt for planting them.  They also brought me a ton of earthbags.  Yay! 

Richard and Justin (Eliana's dad) watch the kids play.

Have no idea what happened here, but I thought it was a cool effect.  That ghostlike creature is actually my good friend Alima, who brought me all kinds of goodies, including earthbags, a basil plant, a jade plant, and a braid of fresh sweetgrass.

Obligatory photo of self; have no idea who took this.  I love my new floppy hat with the chin strap to keep the wind from blowing it away.

Stuff, Stuff, and More Stuff

Well, the countdown is on.  Tomorrow I'm having a yard sale, and so have begun the process of sorting, shifting, piling, and packing.  And filling up trash bags at an alarming rate.  I've even finally driven home to the kids that we are in fact moving out, and they are now actively engaged in the process as well.  As I sit here at my computer, I can look over at the huge pile of stuff for the yard sale that is the tangible result of many hours of work.  If you're in the Taos area, come to my yard sale!  I'm across from the Ranchos post office; you'll see the signs from the main road.

There is still much to do, but I feel like I'm over the hump now, that I've established a momentum.  Much better than the freaked-out paralysis I was experiencing a couple of days ago.

I went out to the land last weekend to move the bus, and actually did manage, with the help of a friend, to get it started, but it would only stay running if I kept my foot on the gas.  And then it just died altogether, possibly because it ran out of gas.  At any rate, my friend, who has a monster truck, has offered to tow it from the junkyard to my land, so I'm extremely grateful for that.  We'll be doing that on Sunday.

In other news, last week I had to drive to Albuquerque for a conference, and it turned out to be a (serendipitously) fruitful trip for my housebuilding project as well.  Right before I left town, I checked Craigslist and someone in Santa Fe had just posted that they were giving away about 60 Saltillo tiles, so I stopped there on my way and loaded them into the Blazer.

I'll be using some of these for the floor of my outdoor shower, initially.

Then, on the way back, I stopped in at the brewery in Santa Fe  and picked up another 100 or so bags.  As it happened, it was happy hour, so I sat outside and enjoyed a glass of beer in the late afternoon sunshine, before doing the last leg of the drive.  It was lovely, and a nice rest between the whirlwind of the conference and returning to the whirlwind of my "normal" life of four kids and five jobs - and now moving, for crying out loud.

Since the trip was paid for by UNM-Taos, my only cost was the price of that $2.50 beer.

Introverted Earthbag Nerd

It's been a rough month with many setbacks, especially financially.  I've been slowly realizing that I will not be able to start building as soon as I'd like, because my money will be tied up in other things.  One of the setbacks is that I was hoping to get out of my lease two months early at the end of April, but the landlords decided they would let me out at the end of May instead.  So I still have one more month of rent and bills to pay before I'm free to spend money on building-related things.

On the bright side, however, I've been getting free bags from a brewery, and I'm actively seeking other free bag suppliers.  I now have somewhere around 200, I'm guessing.  I just started counting them yesterday.

There are many bags stuffed inside each of the ones you see here.

 For those of you not familiar with the earthbag method, one of the issues you have to deal with is poky-outy corners on the bags, which make plastering more difficult.  There are different ways to address this:  1)  "diddle," or poke in the corners, 2) diddle the corners and then pin them for extra hold (there are different ways to do this), or 3) turn the bags inside out.

Since I have nothing better to do to move my building project forward right now, I've decided to use method 3 and do it now, and this way, it will save time during the actual building process, because I won't have to stop and diddle every bag.  I decided that if I can't start building, I can at least do something that moves things in that direction.

So I sat in my backyard, in the glorious spring sunshine, and turned 54 bags inside out.  The bags come from a few different suppliers, and vary in their ease of insideoutability.  Some of the bags are fairly stiff, and  the standard thing seems to be that when they're sealed for shipping, they are sewn across the top with a mixture of red and white thread, which is really thin string.  In what I've come to think of as the Good Bags, it's fairly easy to cut the strings at one end, and pull on the white one, thereby easily unraveling the whole business.  Indeed, in these bags, I rarely had to do that, because it was obviously easy enough for the brewers to have done it themselves.

The Good Bags: nice and soft, easy to open and turn inside out

However, with other bags, there would be evidence of the brewers trying to unravel the string, only to give up and just slash across the bag with a knife.  Or else they'd manage to unravel up to a point that allowed just a big enough opening to pour out the grain, leaving me to take the one pair of crappy scissors I could find, and fight with the rest of the string.  If you've ever had to remove a hem, you have a pretty good idea of what this task is like.  Tedious.

But you know what?  Earthbag nerd that I've become, I enjoyed every moment of working playing with these bags.  Obviously, the ones that were already fully open were more pleasant, but the overall act of preparing my bags for building was immensely satisfying, partly because of the sense of continuity it gave me, that I'm doing something that the future me will thank myself for.  This act of turning the bags inside out, at the very beginning of this project, is directly related to one of the very last steps - plastering the walls.  I couldn't help but think about that, imagining myself in the plastering stage, and the whole thing just gave me a sense of wholeness and fulfillment. A full circle feeling.

My afternoon's work.  Notice the pile on the far right; these are plastic liners that the Good Bags have, and which come out intact, meaning I have a bangup supply of kitchen trash bags now too.

I've said I'm going to try to avoid being too philosophical/spiritual on this blog, but I just can't help it.  I think in metaphors, for one thing, and that just is a part of everything I do.  And so, I have to also mention the rumination I indulged in yesterday about the metaphor of turning bags inside out, or as I'm now calling it, "introverting" them.  You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure.

I tend to be an introvert, and when I'm forced to deal with people and the world too much, I begin to lose it after a while.  The need to retreat within becomes almost as great as the need to eat in its sense of urgency.  This is part of why it's been a dificult month for me, because it seems like I've been around other people constantly, especially with all the work I have right now.  That's why, yesterday when I found myself alone in the house for once, it was so lovely to sit outside and introvert bags, defying the stressed-out Nazi taskmaster within that tells me I have to be "on" 24/7.  And it inspired to me contemplate that in this case, introversion makes the item in question more functional, ultimately more efficient in fulfilling its purpose.  Just like me.

From another angle, I've felt "turned inside out" lately in the sense of feeling exposed and raw.  Which, as unpleasant as that can be, I've come to respect as a useful experience in increasing awareness and true groundedness.  Because it forces me out of the stories in my head and into the moment; it makes me look to reality for a solid place to stand rather than to my beliefs.

Another tangent of my thoughts was about the journey of the bags, and how I get to participate in that and repurpose them.  I enjoyed thinking about the places whose names are printed on the bags, like Germany, the UK, and Belgium, and also about their purpose of transporting grain to be made into beer, and all the many people who will enjoy that beer.   The bags could have been just thrown away after they fulfilled their function, only to sit in some landfill until the sun decomposed them, but instead, they will be refilled and resurrected into something with a much more abiding purpose.  Again, this strikes me as a good metaphor for life (and a timely meditation with Easter just around the corner).  How often do people feel stuck on what seems a dead end road, certain that we know exactly where we're going and what we are and are not capable of?  A few months ago I had no idea I'd be buying land and a bus and building a house; I thought I was stuck in Renter's Hell indefinitely.  But like with these bags, it only takes some imagination and hard work to create a whole new direction.

As you can see, introverting bags became valuable to me in ways I had not anticipated when I sat down to do it. I had begun to fear that the serendipity had run out, but yesterday showed me that I have to actively participate in it before I see it, construct a house for it to move into, so to speak.

Why I'm Building With Earthbags

When I first started researching alternative building methods several years ago, earthbags weren't even on the radar.  I never once came across them in my many hours of wandering the Internet.  With this recent round of research, I discovered them right away, literally within minutes of Googling "alternative building methods."  Why?  Because of two men, Owen Geiger and Kelly Hart, who have taken it upon themselves to disseminate information about this method freely and widely.

After reading on their Earthbag Building website and on Owen Geiger's Earthbag Building Blog, I was quickly sold.  Earthbag building is a simple, dirt cheap way to build an elegant, incredibly strong structure with little or no building experience.  

Geiger also has a blog featuring nothing but a cornucopia of earthbag plans he's designed, which further simplifies the process.  For a very reasonable cost, you can order any of these plans from him.  The plan I've picked out is the Enviro Dome:

 
I've chosen this plan because it's one of the simplest to construct while still providing enough space for my needs.  I also like the fact that it can easily be added onto later.  Using the dome structure means that you don't need a separate roof, which is another plus; you just earthbag it all the way up, using a simple compass to keep the angles accurate.

On another level, the dome structure appeals to me because it resembles a beehive (I don't call myself The Pollinatrix for nothing.)  For years, I've been fascinated by the peregrini, wandering Irish monks of the early Celtic church who would set up beehive-like cells wherever they stopped and stayed for a while.

Monastic beehive cells, circa 6th century,
on the island of Skellig Michael, off the coast of Ireland

Soon I will get to live in my very own 21st century "Be Hive," as I've come to think of it.    

Geiger estimates that you can build a house with earthbags for around $10/sq. ft., using recycled and scavenged materials.  The polypropylene bags needed can be bought from a variety of suppliers at low cost, especially if you buy misprints.  However, these bags can also be obtained for free with a little perseverance.  I've starting looking for local suppliers, and recently found my first bag benefactor, a company in Santa Fe that goes through 20 - 30 bags a week, which would otherwise be discarded.  I am in fact going there today to pick up my first free load of bags.  I figure if I can find about five more suppliers such as this, I can likely build my house without ever having to purchase bags.  It's just a matter of finding businesses like farms and ranches, breweries, etc, that regularly use materials like grain and feed that are packaged in these bags.

One of the wonderful things about Owen Geiger is that he is 100% invested in helping people build this way, as was quickly proven to me when I first began commenting on his blog.  Every time I've asked him a question, he's responded within a day or two with a helpful and detailed answer.  When I first commented that I had decided to use earthbags, and sent him the link to my blog, he immediately responded with enthusiasm and suggested that I use scoria for my bag fill, as its plentiful in my area (there's a volcano nearby).  Kelly Hart built his earthbag house this way, and it's just brilliant.  Scoria is highly insulative; I recently came across the blog of a couple who've built their earthbag dome house this way in Montana, and they say they've been warm all winter in it with just a crappy woodstove.  Scoria is also much lighter than dirt, so the work goes "ten times faster," according to Geiger.  It's also way less messy than using a dirt fill, which needs to be mixed with water.

Since choosing this method and starting this blog, I've discovered a variety of other bloggers who are either in the process of building with earthbags, are planning an earthbag house, or have already completed one.  Just peruse my blogroll, and you'll see what I mean.  I've even found a couple of people in my area who are or will be building with earthbags.  All of this is just incredibly encouraging, to see that truly anyone, no matter how inexperienced at building, can do this, and do it very inexpensively.  And to be part of what feels like a true movement at a time when that movement is really taking off is exciting, especially when there is a sense of community simultaneously building around it, no matter how "virtual."  

Buying Land: Part II

Negotiations ensued alongside my new friendship with Rusty.  The trouble was, he wanted more for his land than my budget will allow.  And it was way more than I had originally anticipated a piece of land on the Mesa would cost.  I'd heard so many stories of cheap parcels out there, as low as a few hundred bucks.

What I've been learning though is that a) land prices on the Mesa, like everywhere else, are rising; and b) you can still get those dirt cheap pieces, but they're not necessarily in a savory spot.  You get what you pay for, as we all know.  It didn't take long to realize that I was willing to pay substantially more than I'd initially factored to get Rusty's land, largely because it's located in an ideal spot near the slope of Cerro de los Taoses, also known as Two Peaks, meaning its features are more interesting than most of the Mesa, which is just plain flat, and it's in a good "neighborhood," which is extremely important on the Mesa for a variety of reasons I'll go into another time.  But beyond these practical reasons, the truth is I already felt that this was where I belong.  Graeme and I both felt it as we stood there watching the moon rise that first night.

That sense of certainty led me to wrongly believe that I could make an offer to Rusty and he would immediately agree to it, tra-la, even if it wasn't for the amount he wanted.  I had decided on a maximum amount I could put down, and I wanted him to let me finance the rest over a period of a year, but he wasn't keen on owner financing at all.  

The other trouble that entered paradise at this point was that Rusty was less than excited about my plan to use earthbags, as they involve plastic, something he considers ugly and evil.  He spent a good bit of time in the beginning trying to talk me into a different method of building, and I found myself conflicted, because just as strongly as I felt his land was the right place, I believed that earthbags were the right method.  

After a rather intense week of spending a lot of time together both socially and negotiation-wise, I decided I needed to leave it alone, and let go of what was already an attachment to this land.  I resisted the temptation to call Rusty and badger him to make a decision about my offer, and I began to look at other land for sale on Craigslist and such, albeit halfheartedly, I'll admit.  

I began to wonder if the serendipity was running out, especially when I didn't hear from Rusty for close to a week.  However, during that time, a wonderful new aspect of this project developed, which was that Nicole, my very best friend in the world, and I began to discuss buying land together, as we've often longed to live together as single mothers, building community and supporting each other.  If she bought a quarter acre of Rusty's land, which is what she could afford, then I could afford to pay him the minimum he would take for all of it up front.  (This minimum, however, was less than what he thought the land was worth.)

We were on the phone one night discussing this, and I was telling her I just wasn't sure anymore what was going to happen with Rusty's land, that I hadn't talked to him in many days.  Then the other line beeped.  And guess who it was, calling to tell me he'd decided he was fine with me using earthbags, and that he could divide the land into an acre parcel for me and another quarter he'd sell to someone else, if I could come up with the  the exact amount Nicole and I had been discussing pooling together.

I called her back when I was done talking to Rusty, and get this:  She'd been doing a Tarot reading while I was on the phone with him, and the card she'd gotten in the future position was a picture of women building a house together.  No lie.

from the Motherpeace deck, the card Nicole drew

Beginner's Mind and Virginal Pep

Let it be known right now that I am a complete research junkie. So as you can imagine, my recent foray into this housebuilding project is utterly fulfilling. Sunrise Sister, a blogging friend of mine, posted this morning about life sometimes being like a Star Trek adventure, and this particular research and planning project definitely has Star Trek-like elements to it. I feel like I'm on a whole new planet. Or to be more precise, I'm more fully on this planet, exploring some of the most fundamental aspects of it for the first time.

I'm no slave to astrology, but there are a couple of weekly horoscopes that I like to read, and one of them is astrobarry, who wrote the following for my last week's horoscope:

You oughtn't buy into the false notion that you need any particular bit of training or experience beyond what you already possess, in order to start making a whole new mound of progress. Instead, consider your relative amateurishness as an asset; lacking the wearisome jaded quality of those who have 'been around the block a hundred times before', you'll bring a virginal pep to activities you try for the first time.

Indeed. I am most definitely feeling full of "virginal pep" these days, and while I'm "making a whole new mound of progress" by filling my brain with all kinds of new information, I'm doing so from the place of what is known in Zen Buddhism as Beginner's Mind.

One of the reasons I've chosen earthbags as my building method is because it's simple for beginning builders to learn, as was demonstrated in full over the past weekend's barn raising.  It was a really a beautiful thing to see around a dozen people who had never built this way before, including the hosts themselves, quickly put together a structure which has the potential to last long beyond our own individual lives.  In fact, earthbag-building is growing like crazy in many parts of the world because it provides structures that are hurricane- and fireproof. And it's an extremely inexpensive building method; that's no small thing these days.

Earthbags lend themselves nicely to round structures, which is what Richard and Kerry are building for their llamas.

The first thing we did is turn all the bags inside out so there would be no corners sticking out:

Then the bags are filled with dirt (other fillers can be used too; more about that another day).  You take a 5-gallon bucket, cut the bottom out, and use it as a chute, or funnel:

To the left you can see Richard and Elisa setting up the chute-in-bag.
Then one person holds it in place, while the other pours bucketfuls of earth.

The foundation is made by digging a trench and filling it with rubble, after which the first course of bags is laid, like so:

Richard and Graeme.
And a whole lot of dirt to fill the bags with.

Richard and Elisa "sewing" the bag closed with a piece of wire.

This was my least favorite part of the process; tedious.

You can just fold the ends of the bag under instead, but it means less full bags, i.e, more bags.

Graeme holding a tamper.
This is used to compact the earthbags after a course is laid, making them into "bricks."
Tamping also allows the courses to be made level.  And it's a whole lot of fun.

After the first course is laid and tamped, two rows of barbed wire go on top to hold the next course in place.
This is sometimes humorously referred to as "Velcro mortar."

Bricks are used to hold the barbed wire in place until the next course is laid.
It's also possible to staple them in place. I think that's how I'll do it; the bricks are inelegant.

Progress!!!

I am so grateful to Richard and Kerry for opening up their home to Eliana, Graeme, and me and giving us this opportunity to learn and practice.  You can see lots more photos (some with me actually in them; I'm the one with the blue bandanna) at Kerry's blog:  One Little Farm.    

Off to a Barn Raising

I've decided to build my house out of earthbags, for a variety of reasons which I will post about in-depth soon, but the reason I want to mention today is that there is a wealth of information and support on the Internet for this method. Here's just one example:

Downloadable earthbag manual: http://www.mkf.in/pdfs/earthbags-english.pdf

Through the vast and extremely helpful website, earthbagbuilding.com, I discovered that Green Desert Eco-Farm, near Canon City, Colorado, is having an earthbag "barn raising" this weekend, to build a shelter for their llamas. Since they're less than a four-hour drive from here, it was a no-brainer for me to participate in this. (It also works out nicely that this is my pre-birthday weekend and I get to take a little road trip.)

This is just one of many examples of how serendipitously things are happening around my decision to build a house.

Not only will I be able to get hands-on experience with this way, but also connect with others who are interested in earthbag building.  I've been emailing back and forth with Kerry, who owns Green Desert Eco-Farm with her husband, Richard, and she's a blogger too!  Check her out at One Little Farm.  I'm very excited to meet these folks. I'll be bringing my three-year-old, which works out nicely because they have kids that are two and four.  My 13-year-old son is also coming with me, as he will be one of my main building partners this summer.

Time to hit the road!