Maggie Mrozowska

Autumn Dawn Sutton wrote:

Maggie Mrozowska wrote:I bought one of those in PDF 2 weeks ago and to be fair they are very basic. Not worth the price but they will give you an idea.

I was pouring through the designs and I see lots of very straight walls and no signs of buttressing. Do the plans you have address this?

Thanks in advance!

I bought a round house plans so no need for buttressing. As for the other plans I can't really tell if they do, as they are really "super basic" and don't address much (I even had to add stuff on them myself so my architect would understand what I want - in my country no one knows about this type of building and we only have one house like this build ages ago in Warsaw).

I bought one of those in PDF 2 weeks ago and to be fair they are very basic. Not worth the price but they will give you an idea.

Rose Nicholas wrote:Hi, this is Rose.  We are currently building our earthbag home in Northern AZ.  After all the research and questions and more research, we decided on the 50/50 mix of our dirt/clay and volcanic cinders that are available in our area.  We are using Lime cement as a hardener.  Like you, we love the round shapes and all of our home will be domes.  A final total of 8.  We will be using cob, plaster and smaller individual sized sandbags to do most of the built ins.  The bags are so easy to mold into the correct shape and then cob over them.  It works very well and I have been experimenting with the different plasters and techniques to figure out what will work best.  I will share pictures as we start getting further along in the process.   Welcome to Permies

Wow guys! Thank you so much for such a great response to my post! So many great ideas and hints. I really appreciate it!

Rose, thank you for your welcome and please share some pictures as I'm so excited to see your progress

Robert, wow, that just opened a whole new level of research for me. Thank you for the tip!
Jane I have spoken to my Polish friend as he is an expert in building all sorts of roofs and he spent some good time working on different projects in USA and he said that there is no problem making those. Exactly as you said I can have them done by metal fabricator exactly how I want it. But scrolling through some videos I have came across something that could be a live saver in terms of doing the concrete bond beam to secure the roof. Here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvptRST4qTM&t=284s
They didn't use any of those metal fittings and also didn't need the concrete bond beam  (which I'm dreading to be fair). They have made those wooden elements (I won't even attempt to guess their English name ) to hold the rafters, secured them with nails to the earthbags and then tamped some more bags to secure the entire structure. Brilliant! And with overhangs from the roof my nightmares about keeping the building from leaking would be at least partially sorted.

Jane, you're more than welcome to hijack a bit of my thread because I can learn from that too . John, Jane is right. Our winters can get pretty cold, if we're "lucky" it can get to -10 Celsius and if we're "very lucky" it can even go as low as -20 Celsius. I know we will need a lot of insulation for this type of winter.
I was again reading on Owen Geiger's blog, that there is all sort of insulation materials to put in the bags in colder climates. He says: "Earthbag building has the unique advantage of providing either thermal mass or insulation, and therefore can be adapted for cold climates with an insulated fill material. Scoria, pumice, perlite, vermiculite or rice hulls could all be used for insulation". Most of those materials unfortunately is a mission impossible to get in Poland but thank God we do have perlite .
I was thinking as per Owen's advice to fill the bags with 50% perlite and 50% with earth and other recommended ingredients.
All I'm fighting with now, is a round roof... sadly my country is soooo backwards... Anything that is not square just doesn't exist, so finding simple materials to connect the wood together to build such roof will be another mission. Maybe I can get them in the UK before we go to build in Poland.

Also one more question popped into my head after watching your video John. Roof. As in Poland we have proper 4 seasons which means hot summer, cold snowy winter and fair amount of rain during spring and autumn, there is a question of waterproofing the building. As I read on Owen Geiger's blog waterproofing domes is always tricky as we want our walls to breathe. I was thinking that maybe I should keep the round structure but instead of complete dome make a round roof like on the video you posted for me. I can see them filling up the roof area with some sort of material and I'm guessing it is done to insulate it. What can provide me with the best insulation in this type of roof?

John, thank you for your answer and video. It's a great video showing the process of building. I'm afraid it will be hard to find those bags in rolls in Poland. I tried to research it but all we seems to have is a single bags in different sizes. Non in rolls in UK either.
The shape of the dome itself will give us nice curves of the building but I would like to know how to do the interiors similar to the pictures I have attached to this post (benches, alcoves, shelves etc). Should I use earthbags as a base and then cob over it and use some limewash at the end?

Hi Anne
Thank you for your answer. No, we are planning to build earthbag dome as we fell in love with round shapes. We also would like to know what to use and how to shape the interiors to be round (like those sleeping alcoves, shelves and the whole interiors in general).

Hi everyone. As I'm quite new to the topic I would like to ask for your advice. My husband and I we are planning to build our earthbag home (which I've been studying for a while now). We love those round interiors in some of the houses we have found on the internet (we hate square and pointy, anything modern is a no for us). And here is my question: how to make them happen? How to build those beautiful round interiors? Do we need to use cob or other materials? I tried to find some info on the internet but as English is not my first language I can't really figure out the search phrase that would give me the results I want. We appreciate any help.