New Mexico "Earthship Inspired" Tire Bale home update

We just finished the scariest part of our tire bale build... installing a concrete bond beam around the top of the walls.  The tire bales are big bouncy bricks, and we could wiggle and jiggle the walls before the concrete bond beam was installed.  It is a challenge building with the bales because nothing is square, nothing is uniform, and measurements come after installation rather than before -- you just have to make the house as big as the tire bales turn out to be.

The hard part about the concrete bond beam is that the top perimeter of the walls is very bumpy and irregular, with many crevasses and caverns into the bales where concrete could leak.  Building forms on the bales is a challenge because the concrete is so heavy it could bust out the forms if they aren't robust enough, and so liquid it could seep out below the forms where the tires dip.

I wrote a couple blog posts about it for anyone interested in the details.. Taming the Bounce House Part One and Taming the Bounce House Part Two

AWESOME!  I really appreciate you posting this.  This and adobe fascinate me.  I had to go read your blog posts.  If we get a handle on this pandemic, I'd love to see this before it's completed.  I will be watching you.

Looks like it's almost two years since our last tire bale house update on Permies... !

Here is a link to our post about getting the main stick-bilt part of the house framed and the roof on 4/2021: BrownKawa.com - We've been framed
This one is about getting our tanks plumbed to start catching the rain 7/2021: BrownKawa.com - Monsoon

We dropped offline with COVID and our resulting terrible internet -- at least i stopped doing those time-intensive blog posts!
We are climbing back in now that we have Starlink in our area. What a godsend!

Anyway, this post from the other day is about a year past due, and talks about difficulty with earth plaster and our angsty decision to shotcrete the outside: BrownKawa.com - Giving it our best shot Part one
And this is the latest I just posted tonight (although it only covers us through March) and is about using earthbags to fill in the upper walls, and getting more windows in: BrownKawa.com - The Closers

Spoiler alert: we are 3 years into our build and still slowly plugging away while living in our tiny pop-up.
Disclaimer: i know our house is not an earthship; there just isn't a category on Permies for us and this is the closest...

Anyway, I hope this is useful or interesting to someone! :D

Bryan Elliott wrote:AWESOME!  I really appreciate you posting this.  This and adobe fascinate me.  I had to go read your blog posts.  If we get a handle on this pandemic, I'd love to see this before it's completed.  I will be watching you.

Thanks Bryan, and sorry it took me so long to reply! I often miss comments on my threads; maybe i have my settings messed up or something.

Anyway, it is still gonna take forever for our house to be completed; let us know if you are out this way (we are close to i-40 between Grants & Gallup). Might want to PM me or try on our blog so it's not another year before I see it! :D

Thanks for the update Kimi,
I checked out some of your 'blog posts. Wow! what an awesome project. Glad you've got a roof on at least. I loved the stop gap video of the timber frame going in.
I definitely found it interesting, even if I'll never find it useful.
Wishing you well.

here is our latest update which takes us up through last June.
It includes sealing the interior tire walls and finally getting our shell completely closed in!

BrownKawa Farmstead Giving It Our Best Shot, Part Two

To bring our updates back to this central thread, here are three posts on plastering:

https://www.brownkawa.com/post/getting-plastered
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/canelo-clay-and-lime-workshop
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-house

...and here are two posts on our worm septic system, which I also posted on toilet alternatives a while back...

https://www.brownkawa.com/post/first-worm-septic-system-permit-in-the-usa
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/building-our-worm-septic-system

I hope they are useful to someone

Now we are finally working on the interior! Into our fourth year on this project; fifth year living in a tiny tent pop-up camper...

Kimi,
Wow!  You and your husband do everything with style.  I'm glad to see the update and pick up some ideas.  My wife and I are moving to New Mexico between Santa Fe and Las Vegas this year and we are going to be starting with no improvements also.  I don't expect our project will start the scale of yours but it's still going to challenge us.  I'll be studying your posts on adobe and plastering.

Bryan Elliott wrote:Kimi,
Wow!  You and your husband do everything with style.  I'm glad to see the update and pick up some ideas.  My wife and I are moving to New Mexico between Santa Fe and Las Vegas this year and we are going to be starting with no improvements also.  I don't expect our project will start the scale of yours but it's still going to challenge us.  I'll be studying your posts on adobe and plastering.

Excellent, Bryan! Welcome to the Land of Enchantment.

Thank you for the kind words!

If we could do one thing differently, it would have been to start ten years earlier.

If we could do one more thing differently it would have been to start with a 120 sq ft outbuilding that we could live in while building our house. So I am happy to hear you are starting smaller!

When you and your wife get to NM; feel free to PM us if you have questions. I highly recommend getting in touch with Cornerstones and joining in on a project with them in Santa Fe or Chimayo -- they are so knowledgeable and helpful! A day of volunteering with them is like going to a workshop but $hundreds cheaper (free), and they are often working in your neck of the woods so you can do it as a day trip.

Best of luck!

I've read some of the blog posts-this is an impressive project!
I am curious, is this build cheaper than using strictly conventional materials?

William Bronson wrote: I've read some of the blog posts-this is an impressive project!
I am curious, is this build cheaper than using strictly conventional materials?

Thanks for the question. I would say it's impossible to compare apples to apples when looking at conventional vs this type of housing. I will also say our goal was not to be cheaper than stick built, but to build a passive solar off-grid house with low water impact that we would be happy to live in as our home through retirement. Our house is bigger than we thought originally because we raised the roof a little more to allow lofts with good headroom and the string of clerestories. It also looks (on the outside) bigger than it is (1000 sq ft interior footprint) because of the 6' thick walls and the big water catchment roof extending over the outdoor areas.

If we had contractors doing everything it would certainly be more expensive this way. You would either need specialized contractors or conventional contractors willing to take a huge risk which probably means high prices, and it's more labor intensive than stick built.

If we did it 100% ourselves the materials cost would certainly be cheaper than stick built. That just means that the tire bales, bond beam, earth bags, and dirt floor are cheaper than materials for stick building those parts on a concrete slab and installing HVAC. (Pretty much the rest of our house is conventionally built.) It is also far more comfortable because it moderates the temperatures so well.

Either way, the labor is more intensive for every step [except for laying the tire bales, which of course is vastly less labor intensive since two people can erect 3 massive walls in 2 days]. The unconventional work is more labor intensive in itself, and if you are inexperienced (like us, or like a conventional contractor) then you are constantly adjusting how to do things, testing, re-adjusting, then implementing. And spending a lot of time thinking. And planning.

Plumbing for switchable greywater reuse is obviously more expensive than sending all of your water down one sewer pipe.

Our vermiseptic is cheaper than conventional septic and way cheaper than having someone else install septic (plus provides a reuse for blackwater as submerged irrigation for landscape -- makes greywater plumbing less necessary, but we didn't get our vermiseptic permit until after I installed the greywater plumbing).

We are off grid, so building our own water and power infrastructure is more expensive than hooking up to existing services, but the utilities are free after that.

If you do it all yourself and account for your valuable time, green building is VASTLY more expensive.

If you do it all yourself and "pay" yourself minimum wage, green building is more expensive than conventional.

If you do it all yourself and think your time is worth $0, green building might be cheaper.

If you enjoy the work, then 4 years of building a house is a lot cheaper than 4 years of taking cruises, so it's way cheaper.

If you think of it as a great education, then 4 years of building a house is a gold mine compared with 4 years of college or 4 years of natural building workshops.

Bottom line: if you made a small and simple tire bale house we could lay the 3 main walls for $400 to bring in the bales + $600 to rent a forklift for 2 days (our very helpful landfill is only 7 miles away). Then you could cover the walls: lots of time with your own handheld mortar sprayer, plus the cost of the concrete, or using your own dirt for free (we used a shotcrete contractor: more expensive but only took 2 days). That is the cost of the most "different" part of our build, and you have a million directions you could take it from there to frame the rest in and put on a roof and install systems.

I would be happy to share our costs with you, except we don't know them! We do have records (our sold house equity, receipts, online receipts, bank records etc) but haven't taken the time to figure them out and I'm not sure if we will ever take the time...

You could do it more cheaply than we are doing it. We are thrifting materials where we can, but we did decide to make our "forever" home, so some of our decisions have added time and cost. We also chose to do this on a permit so that we can promote some of the technologies if and when they are successfully implemented, and that added costs -- we cross every t and dot every i and jump through every hoop and hope to stretch our state's acceptance. We also don't want to saddle our kids with a property that they can't unload and the permits will make it easier for buyers to get a loan, insurance, etc.

In any event, we still feel the decisions we've made have been worth it for us, and every person has to find that line for themselves. In retrospect I would have started with a small livable building that we could use as a learning project (and later guest cabin) so we'd have a more comfortable place to live while pursuing our dream. But I don't dwell on that -- we (usually) stay positive and keep looking & pushing forward! And we still share the same vision.

Kimi, your reply was very generous!
Thank you for the great wrap around view of this undertaking and the relative costs.

I believe you mention in a previous thread that no foundation is needed for tire bales?
That alone is a huge cost saving.
I will have to peruse your blog to see how that interacts with your earthen floor.

I am curious, do you think applying shotcrete or another cementious stucco before pouring a bond beam would be easier?
Also, do you think a wooded bond beam work on tire bale walls?

Your choice to jump through the governmental hoops is admirable.
It would have been easier to simply avoid building codes, etc,but you are unlocking regulatory barriers instead, and that is a great contribution to society.

Thanks for your reply and kind words.

William Bronson wrote:I believe you mention in a previous thread that no foundation is needed for tire bales?
That alone is a huge cost saving.
I will have to peruse your blog to see how that interacts with your earthen floor.
It would have been easier to simply avoid building codes, etc,but you are unlocking regulatory barriers instead, and that is a great contribution to society.

Our engineer first drew it up on a concrete slab. We said we wanted to minimize concrete and asked for a rubble trench foundation just under the bales. He came back with a concrete foundation just under the bales, which is what we went with. The Colorado tire bale homes engineered by Mike Shealy do not use a concrete foundation, I don't think... Jim Gagnepain has posts on Permies about his build and might be able to give you more info.  In retrospect, we live on highly erosive sandy loam on the face of a high desert mesa, so my hub and I are happy with the concrete-under-the-bales solution. The rebar network provided the ground for our solar and electrical systems. The wire that wraps our bales is embedded in the concrete at top and bottom. We feel like it is rock-solid and that feels good. In a million years instead of sliding into a canyon, we think our house will be like a Bisti Badlands mushroom !

William Bronson wrote:I am curious, do you think applying shotcrete or another cementious stucco before pouring a bond beam would be easier?
Also, do you think a wooded bond beam work on tire bale walls?

I am not an engineer so I can't say what can or can't work, but can only give my impressions as a layperson owner/builder. I would not put shotcrete on top of the bales before adding the bond beam, as tempting as it sounds (yes it would make the process less scary). The bond beam needs to integrate with the bales. That pour did feel very dicey. We had to thread the needle -- avoid allowing literal tons of concrete to pour into all of the cavities, while allowing the concrete to integrate with the bales. It was wired and rebarred. We stuffed big voids with dry trash and put additional mesh on the top surface to slow concrete without stopping it. In the end, it all worked!

I would not used a wooden bond beam, and I think most people walking on the stacked tire bale walls would not want to use a wooden bond beam -- the unprotected bale walls are very bouncy and wobbly!  On the one hand the big blocks way a ton each, are solid as a rock, have a 4'x5' footprint, and "aren't going anywhere."  On the other hand, standing on top of 3 tiers of bales stacked brickwise, you can feel them jiggle when you jump, and sway when you rock side-to-side. Before wiring our bales, we had 3 we wanted to remove. My husband was able to shove the first one off with his foot, and as it tumbled down we were surprised to see that it took the other two with it!

I can't imagine being able to build a wooden bond beam that I would trust on that type of wall.

Once the concrete bond beam was poured, the whole thing really did become monolithic.

It might be different if you were berming all the way up outside the 3 sides. But no, I would still want to know that the walls were solidly connected so I wouldn't have to even imagine a bale falling inward.

Homestead Rescue (or whatever that reality show is called) had an episode rescuing a tire bale house build in Ohio. They had a wall falling over, among other big problems. It would be a good watch for anyone tempted to cut corners...

One more resource:  PSE engineering engineered our house (it was their first tire bale house). We can't legally share the plans they made for us, but they do share a couple pictures of our plans on their website at https://www.structure1.com/tire-bale-home-engineering/ which also provides some general tire bale engineering guidelines. The first page shows the foundation-bales-bond beam connection, including the wire wrap and rebar.

And rumor has it there might be engineers in CO with Mike Shealy (R.I.P.) plans, but I don't know where or how to find them.

William Bronson wrote:Your choice to jump through the governmental hoops is admirable.
It would have been easier to simply avoid building codes, etc,but you are unlocking regulatory barriers instead, and that is a great contribution to society.

Thank you; that is our unpaid-career-in-retirement goal! But where we are, it also made it easier (possible) to obtain tire bales. In NM they are highly tracked as a hazardous waste, so we needed an environmental tire recycling permit to get the bales, and needed the building permit to get the recycling permit. I wanted the building permit anyway regardless of our building methods for the other reasons, but I'm not sure we could have gotten tire bales for this house without a permit.

In our county, building without a permit is very easy otherwise. Technically everyone in NM needs a permit; if the county doesn't require it you go through the state. The state requires a one-line county OK -- when we went to get that, even our county officials said, "Why do you want a permit? It's your land, isn't it?" Needless to say, most folks we know here built without a permit.

McKinley County NM, folks, if you are looking for a place with cheap land and permit-free potential!

William Bronson wrote:
I will have to peruse your blog to see how that interacts with your earthen floor.

p.s. Within the "U" of the concrete foundation is "undisturbed dirt" and we are building up our earthen floor on that, all the way out to meet the shotcreted tire bales.

It may be our next blog post but I don't know how soon... we have completed small test patches of saltillo tile in the utility room and clay soil under the stairs, and finished our (conventional) loft floors, but still need to do our sloped shower floor before posting, and maybe some of the bigger saltillo & clay areas...