We are testing out Earthbag Construction to see how it works down here. It appears to be fairly easy and inexpensive and can be made to look very nice. The big benefit is the thick walls that keep it cool inside.
To test it out, we are constructing a dog house for our five dogs......it will be the most luxurious eco-friendly dog house on earth!!!!
We pulled the dirt right out of the hill and tested it and found we had a high clay content so we extracted some river sand from the stream on the property to get the correct mix. The river rock left over was used as the base under the grade beam on the lower layer (1 ft) and the upper layer is white rock (1ft). We then used the sheet metal cut off of the container door from our container home as the shell for our grade beam.
For the grade beam we chose Construction Lime as that is more economic and much better for the environment than cement. The bags were donated by a neighbor and filled with the dirt removed from same location mixed with the river sand. The compass was made from 2 metal poles already on site (one was from the container door) and welded by a neighbor for $40.
The bags were packed and stacked by my caretaker who at first thought we were crazy but after some initial training is now very excited to work on the house every day!!
We recently cut some Melina wood during the correct full moon to rid of termites and that is drying and will be used for the roof along with the Clay Nicaraguan Barrell tiles.
Below are some photos of the process:
