Providing Creative Alternatives

Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag Papercrete House  is an hour and a half DVD, produced by Kelly Hart. It sells for $29.95. (Click on the image to buy it.)

Kelly says:

We wanted to build an environmentally sensitive and aesthetically pleasing home at a moderate price. We chose to create earthbag domes covered with papercrete (recycled paper combined with cement and sand).

This honest program documents details of the construction, insights gained, and the ups and downs (literally!) of the building process. During construction, I kept a video camera handy. The DVD shows how we piled the earthbags, also called sandbags, and how we used barbed wire between the rows of bags for added stability.

When my wife Rosana was working at the local library, someone returned the program one day and said to her, "We had a few good laughs last night at Kelly's expense." I intentionally included some of the problems to help people see what is really involved.

This ended up being a very low-cost way to build. Not only is the house a beautiful space, we have the satisfaction of knowing we created an economical, ecological home.

Several other earthbag homes are also shown in the DVD.

It was completed after A Sampler of Alternative Homes, so it has a lot more information about earthbag building and this house.

Also, do come visit our comprehensive website, greenhomebuilding.com and our site dreamgreenhomes.com, which features sustainable house plans.