Dirt-Cheap Homes
My wife, Mary Jane, and I built our first earthbag home in 2009, after being inspired by the Mother Earth News book Earthbag Building. Our circular house was 20 feet in diameter and incorporated a bottle wall and reclaimed French doors. The build took us less than five months, and the total cost was under $5,000. The structure went viral on social media.
Since then, we’ve worked on many earthbag projects, including an Earthship-inspired domicile and a spring-fed aboveground pool featured in this magazine (“Down-to-Earth Pools,” June/July 2021). Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about how to streamline the process of building with earthbags.
An earthbag structure is made of stacked bags filled with earth. In my experience, this is one of the strongest, most versatile, and yet least expensive natural building techniques. The fill material is readily available almost anywhere, and will be either dirt cheap, or free! Bags filled with soil can be used in high-moisture applications that would be unsuitable for wood, cob, hempcrete, or straw bales. They’re perfect for above-and belowground greenhouses, root cellars, storm shelters, benches, cisterns, and much more. Earthbags are mold-proof, fireproof, bug-proof, bulletproof, and rot-proof. This building medium is strong and adaptable.
