[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: Shelves and … Food!

The shelves felt like  a small scale "industrial" project ... mass production and assembly of parts. I had already charred a few boards in preparing for the shelves. Now it was time to cut them up and make them into frames. Then piled them up for charring the remaining parts at the "charring station" just [...]

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 [...]