Building an Earthship on a budget

Hey fellow Permies! Here's a video I just did with my neighbor and buddy Matt on our YouTube channel, "Owner Builders Unite". We go over some things you can save on while building your Earthship and the process that both of us went through while building ours.

If you like alternative building and Earthships give it a like! Thanks everyone for reading and watching!

https://youtu.be/cEvNafe6hiw?si=T06dcPwZxFaQ5apf

Cool! I'm gonna check this out later today.

Edit: Watched. Yeah, get stuff used/for free is a great idea, and part of the Earthship ethos as well. I bet there are very few people building Earthships who don't do this.

I'm curious to know, when you talk about throwing build parties or tire-pounding parties, how do you find all those people with all that free time?

If I were building an Earthship, I can think of maybe 3 or 4 people I know who would be willing to help out for maybe a few hours in exchange for some pizza and fun. Double it if they drag along their spouses. I very much doubt I could get all of them together at once, because they are busy people with jobs and kids, and schedules just don't align. There's no way I'd get any of them for a whole day. This is something that always mystified me about Earthship builds.

I get that there are some people who do it to learn the skills, often because they want to build their own Earthship one day and they know putting in time now will help them get help later when they need it. But I can't believe there are enough of them to populate a whole "party".

Is being very popular a prerequisite to building an Earthship? Do you need to be an experienced party-thrower? What's your secret there?

Hey Ned

Thanks for watching and good questions/comments about the work parties.

It certainly doesn't hurt to be good at throwing parties but not necessary... luckily me and Matt live in a pretty cool small community where there's a lot of alternative building going on. Everything from Earthships, Strawbales, Earthbags, rammed Earth, just to name a few. So being around others in a small area all doing similar things kinda help you work with each other and live closely verses more populated areas let alone cites where you might not even know your neighbors. Earthship Biotecture and Michael Reynolds who founded Earthships in Taos, NM (just 2 hours away from us) had a similar situation over the years. A lot of people wanting to build alternatively in small rural areas...

We all work jobs and have regular schedules and lives as well... but there's always the weekends! Some people like to go out to dinner or watch sports with there friends and others like to live off grid and live a life style that let's you help your crazy neighbors build alternative houses! haha I guess you gotta be crazy to want to pound all those tires anyways!

Either way thanks for the thoughtful question and hope some of my explanation helps! You're certainly right though... a lot of people aren't in positions to have "work parties" with friends doing similar things so for that I feel extremely grateful.

-Pete

Hi Pete, thanks for demystifying that a bit.

Your answer was informative, but also, for me, a bit disheartening. Earthships and Earthship-inspired homes often come with the tagline "and if we can build these in the harsh New Mexico desert, we could be building them anywhere!"

For nearly a decade, I've dreamed of building an Earthship-inspired home. I fantasized about how I'd build it so cheaply because I'm good at scavenging and reclaiming trash...but as I learned more about construction I realized materials aren't where the major costs come from in building a house, or most anything else. It's labor.

Well, tight little communities of "crazy" friends who are into alternative off-grid building and have free time are not everywhere (that's part of what makes those communities so cool!)--as you said, "a lot of people aren't in positions to have 'work parties' with friends doing similar things"--so the tagline probably isn't true, at least not if Earthships are to retain their advertised quality of being more cost-effective than conventional construction.

That's the sense I get anyway. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone to become a specialized "Earthship build party organizer"--such a person could make a career going around from place to place rounding up cool local people who want to help out wherever someone wants an Earthship built.

But for now it seems, the only way to build an Earthship "on a budget" is to build it near a bunch of other people with free time who are also building them.