Our friend Owen Geiger has been designing small houses, Kelly has recently been putting some of the plans up on his ecological house plans website, and Owen’s plans have already begun to sell. Links are at the end of this article.

I still find myself slightly astonished that so many people are now “getting it” about the need to live more in harmony with the earth. Yes, I know it’s also about the economic crisis, but for whatever complex mix of reasons, it’s heartening to see people beginning to change. The increased interest in small and ecological house plans is part of this.

Owen has been working on his house plans for years and now has put over 80 of them online. We used to live with Owen, in our earthbag house, and I grinned when I saw various details of that house filtered through Owen’s mind on the spiral house design (link in the list below). He’s designed for earthbags and for strawbale, and the designs can be modified.

Here’s a bit from Owen’s earthbag house plans site where he talks about the value of small houses:

As far as house size, I’ve tried to return to the sizes prevalent 50-100 years ago, when an 800 sq. ft. bungalow was perfectly satisfactory. People didn’t feel deprived or poor in these houses. In fact, 800 sq. ft. is spacious in comparison to many houses around the world. Our current attitude of larger is better needs to change to meet the reality of dwindling resources, lack of affordable housing and global climate change. Not only are small houses less expensive to build, they’re also easier to clean, and have lower utility and maintenance costs.

You can continue reading his thoughts on the details page of his earthbag plans site. He’s also got a strawbale house plans site – he’s got a lot of strawbale background.

Many of the plans are up on my husband’s site dreamgreenhomes.com. To find all of Owen’s small house plans there, go to http://www.dreamgreenhomes.com/aboutus/profiles.htm
and scroll down to Owen’s profile.

While I was there, I snitched the code and here are Owen’s small house plans on that site now. (There likely will be more in the future.)

Barn-style House
Beachcomber
Chalet
Chonburi
Cozy Cottage
Craftsman House
Crow Design
Duplex
Earth Lodge
Earthbag Arc House
Earthbag Beach House
Earthbag Cabin
Earthbag Office
Earthbag Studio
Earth-bermed Natural House
English Earthbag Cottage
Enviro Earthbag Dome
Farmhouse
Green House
Attached Greenhouse
L-Shaped House
Modern House
Mountain Cottage
Native Spirit
Peace Dome
Shop with Office
Solar Ranch House
Solar Santa Fe
Spiral Earthbag House
Square House
Subterranean Survival Shelter
Summer Breeze
10 meter Earthbag Roundhouse
2-Story Bungalow
2-Story Earthbag Roundhouse
U-Shaped Earthbag House
Wilderness Cabin.

Almost makes me want to build another little house! Almost.

This article came from: Small Houses at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

So how do people learn to do this unusual method?

The book Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series) is probably one of the main ways. It covers many aspects of earthbag home building, in lots of detail. The method described differs from our approach in several ways. As my husband Kelly says in his review of the book, he finds the degree of precision excessive. Also, we filled our bags with insulating material, where they only advocate using soils. Here’s a bit more from Kelly’s review:

In the end the reader is given a wealth of information, gleaned from the authors’ hard experience, in a manner that is quite readable and clearly illustrated. I can recommend Earthbag Building for anyone thinking about building this way, as long as the perspective is taken that what they present is only one of many ways that earthbags might be utilized for construction.

You can read all of Kelly Hart’s review of Earthbag Building by clicking this link.

Other resources for learning about the method include Kelly’s website www.earthbagbuilding.com and the DVD we produced:

Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag / Papercrete House

This article came from: Earthbag Building: Book Review at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Now that green is finally fashionable, there are a lot of websites trying to take advantage of the latest trend. You won’t find those listed here. I am looking for websites on simple living and/or green living that provide useful information. Fine with me if they sell products too – hey, I link to Amazon every time I mention a good book! – but to be listed here, the sites have to be ones worth surfing to in their own right.

I’ll start today with a couple of the sites of my husband, Kelly Hart.

[1] Greenhomebuilding.com

This is Kelly’s largest site. It’s got hundreds of pages on all aspects of green home building. The easiest way to find something specific is the search box in the upper right of the home page or on the bottom of most other pages.

The table across the top is on every page, and will take you to the various categories of the website… oh, cool, when I just cut and pasted the words from that table, all the links came along, so I will just leave them here:

• Blog
• Sustainable Architecture
• Events
• Financial Aspects
• Owner/builder
• About Us
• Vernacular Architecture
• Education
• Store
• Posters
• Building Codes
• Ask the Experts
• Natural Building
• Bulletin Board
• Environment
• Building Components

That “Ask the Experts” section draws on commentary from some three dozen experts. Readers send in questions, Kelly forwards them to the right expert, and eventually posts the answers on the site.

The earthbag page shows the house that we built in Colorado, about halfway down the page.

[2] Earthbagbuilding.com

When we built our earthbag house in Crestone, Colorado, in the late 1990s, there was not much information available on the topic. Now there is much more, and there is so much going on around the world that Kelly and our good friend Dr. Owen Geiger are always finding new building projects to add to this website. They also do an earthbag blog together at http://earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com/ and I’m including a screenshot because you can get an idea of the building process from the pictures:

Earthbags are an incredibly inexpensive way to build a shelter and I think they have a good future in the US for people who need a simple place to live that they can build themselves.

This article came from: Simple Green Living: Finding Good Websites at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

The house has a wonderful handmade quality. Here’s a page on the earthbag building site that Kelly runs with our friend Dr. Owen Geiger about the earthbag house we built.

Our house is 1250 square feet or so, but much smaller structures could go up very quickly and inexpensively. You can fill the bags with dirt from the site. We built this in a county that did not have building codes, which certainly helped, but such a house can be built in other places.

(As I tell on the About Us page, we sold the house to friends. Every time we are in Crestone, we visit them and see what they have done lately to the place.)

Here is a snippet from the DVD that Kelly produced about the process.

Once in a while the message will come up that the video isn’t available… I don’t know why it says that because it is. If that happens, just go directly to the video on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJc2traH6N4 and there are also a variety of videos by other people on earthbags given in a list there.

Earthbag building is just one of many innovative and inexpensive building methods that people are using. Our home has a two-page spread in a wonderful large paperback that is full of inspiration, Home Work by Lloyd Kahn.

This article came from: Earthbag Building at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.