Shiny Clay Wall Finishing

I enjoyed this video very much - it made me want to get back to clay: https://youtu.be/wTY6arzNs24 It gave me confidence that my experiments in the earthbag cellar were in the right direction - and that with additional refinement, wonderful results can be achieved with earth!It confirmed how important the material mix is in achieveing [...]

[Webinar] Building with Earthbags: our experience with the cellar

Dear friends,In the last 2 years we built our cellar from earth bags. It was mostly the two of us... helped along the way a bit by volunteers and friends. We learned a lot, people started to ask questions. This is how Iulia started the Romania: EarthBags Building / Constructii din saci umpluti cu pamant [...]

Earthbag Cellar – Ventilation Chimney

This seemingly small part of the project turned out to be a place where I immersed myself more than I expected. The initial objective was to protect the ventilation exhaust pipes from sun (they are made of plastic), rain and rodents. But as it came into being I felt it was a surprisingly prominent aesthetic [...]

Earthbag Cellar – Structure Done(-ish)

When I thought I'd finished with the internal walls I decided to play around with some of the cracks by filling them with clay-slip. What started out with a small local (small spot) experiment became another layer of finishing on all the walls. In the small room (sorry no pictures!) that experiment was expanded to [...]

Earthbag Cellar: Earthen Finishing

A couple of months ago Iulia posted on a local (our village) Facebook page that we are looking for help with the cellar construction - women only! One woman expressed her interest and finally, in the last stretch of earthwork the circumstances matured for her to join us. Speranta was with us for a few [...]

Earthbag Cellar: Cob Bench, More Earth Finishing & Final Burial

We finally got around to converting the three stumps of wood in the retaining wall into a bench.  Long pieces of wood were laid length-wise (and some anchored down with bent nails). ... and then covered with cob: ... on top of which another layer of cuttings was laid out (to extend the width of [...]

Earthbag Cellar: Lots of Earth Finishing and … finally … an Umbrella

So (this post is already a few days too late to be written in the present tense ... especially since we've more progress since then ... but I will do so anyway) we had Razvan visit with us for 5 full days of work and we got lots done. We had already started applying finishing [...]