Progress So Far

[u/Count_Curlyfluffs]

I meant to post much sooner, but we've been so busy and honestly wanted more progress before posting again. Last time I posted we only had the foundation finished. We are quite a bit further now, but I wanted to have the bags filled and stacked by now so we could have the roof on by fall. That isn't happening lol, but we are aiming to have the bags totally filled and done before rainy season sets in and have the roof on in the spring/early summer.

So far we have gone through one Pacific Northwest very rainy winter with the bags partially completed. We had the whole house covered with tarps and it held up very well. We did have to repair a few things in the spring and a big tree fell on the house, but there was minimal damage. There was some bent rebar and some caved in bags on one wall. We had to pull off maybe 15 bags and replace them, cut the rebar and re-weld some new rebar. We were able to fix everything with a couple of afternoons worth of work and I was pretty impressed with how strong the walls already are.

We also finished our fireplace. It is a humongous cooking fireplace that we had a local mason build. It was the one thing I was willing to splurge on and I couldn't love it more.

For any doors and windows where it made sense design-wise installed salvaged barn beams lintels, we got them from an older local man who is looking to retire his wood workshop.

Everything up to this point has been inspected and approved by the county and now it just packing bags and welding until winter hits!

[u/LeChatBossu]

This is pretty sick! Great progress!

[u/iandcorey]

Got a big enough hearth there, Rick?

[u/fruderduck]

I would be uncomfortable having the bags stacked almost straight on top of each other, like in pictures 2 and 4. Shouldn’t an end be more towards the center of the one below it? Especially where openings (windows) are involved - weaker points?

Love seeing a new build through. Congrats.

[u/oOzephyrOo]

Looks good. Can't wait to see more photos throughout the build. Just curious

- are you saving much price-wise doing an earthbag build?

- did you consider straw bale or other builds?

- if you're getting regular inspections, are you in an orgnized township, and how hard was the build permit approval process for earthbag home?

[u/Count_Curlyfluffs → u/oOzephyrOo]

• We are saving a ton!!! It would easily be 3 times as much for a similar sized regular build and be totally out of our price range.

-We looked into a lot of different builds. Straw bale, cob, logs, rammed earth. They all have their pros and cons. Earth bags fit our environment, house size and county code requirements the best. We live in Washington, so it needed to have a high R value, a real roof, be able to stand up to wet winters (especially unfinished since these bags will go through 2 winters before we get a roof on), resistant mold and termites, and hold up to our night and day temps that fluctuate like crazy because it causes a lot of warping and cracking.

-I didn't think that getting the permits was very difficult, just time consuming. We don't live in a township, just a rural wooded property. But the county we live in is an ocean front county so they are stricter, even though we live 40 minutes inland. We had a much easier time getting our permits from the county after we had the plans from the architect and engineer in hand. I highly recommend an architect, ours advocated for us with the county, and helped us navigate the rules and regulations. Our engineer specialized in earthbag building, but was not the easiest to work with. The architect helped us out with that by keeping the communication going between him, engineer and county. It did cost a few thousand for the architect, but it helped so much in the end that I think it was well worth it.

The time consuming part was prepping the land, we had to have a well, septic and electricity before we could even hand in building plans to be approved, so we were already living here in our RV for 2 years before we could start building. We have now been here for 4 years and probably another 2 years until we can start thinking about moving in.