Wow I've never heard of earthbag homes. They look so beautiful! You'd never see that in NYC. I need to travel for sure.

hey you , huggles .,
Thanx for the update
good luck with the construction of your home

you need to take pictures to the house

Those houses are beautiful.

Earthbag is very cool, although if you have time and dirt, rammed earth is also. The nice thing about rammed earth is that the walls you get don't need to be cobbed; cobbing is really time consuming. *Really* time consuming. Of course, so is ramming, but it's about the same as building an earth bag.

Good for you for building out of your cash flow! If you can avoid having a loan on your place, that will be huge!

Construction loans are hard even if you're doing something conventional. Going it alone will take longer, but if you have a way to stay dry for the duration it'll be better in the long run—you won't be stressed out by construction loan deadlines, and you'll be one of those rare people these days with some equity in your house. BTW, I don't know if passive solar is an option for you, but those walls are going to have some bitchen' thermal mass!

This is such awesome idea. I would love to have a hand built self sufficient home to work on. I hope you find time to post lots of pictures of the construction process and keep us updated on how its going

Build it as you go.
Nice! Can always add to it later.
Hope everyone is doing well.

It's pretty hard to get by with no septic system unless they'll let you have an outhouse. In Cochise County they wouldn't let us do an outhouse, but we finally got one approved based on a sealed concrete design. Unfortunately, we still had to have a small septic system for the sink—they wouldn't let us treat kitchen sink water as grey water because of the possibility of meat waste going down the drain (they don't care if you're vegan).

It'll save you a lot of hassle if you can just put in the septic, but depending on your location it might not be cheap. We got by with a $4000 system for a three bedroom house with an outbuilding (we wound up not building the house, but our neighbor was happy that we put the septic in—she's using it now). But that was in Arizona on soil that perked really fast.

In Vermont, on a rocky slope, we looked into getting a Presby system, which will work pretty much anywhere if the health department approves it, which they do in Vermont. Then we wound up buying a different property that had town sewer, and that problem (thankfully) went away.

It's an adventure...

This is absolutely fascinating. Please Please give us a step by step update. What are you planning to filll the bags with? Mellon talked about Thermal Mass so should I assume Soil? Also all of these roofs seem to be put on top with separate materials rather then a dome idea, is that the plan for your home? If so what materials are you looking into using?

Hope I'm not being too inquisitive!