ฺBuilding Our Earthen home Episode 1 Why We Build with Earth.

I'm Peggy and Joe and I are doing this episode today to introduce a new series that we're about to start called Building Our Own Earthen Home. And so on this series, what we want to do is bring everyone through the process of building an earthen home along with us as we start a new build. We are preparing now for building a new house that we'll be starting next week. And the idea of the series is that we're gonna put together all of the shared information and experience that we've had up till now in building and try to make this series the most up-to-date with the kind of techniques and knowledge that we've learned about how we wanna build, how to build, how to make it the longest lasting and the most beautiful or the most durable, easiest ways with less impact on our bodies. And we've been using, you know, in the beginning when we started teaching earthen building, we really were mostly just focused on how to make it the cheapest way possible, the easiest way possible, and we're still very dedicated to that. But we also wanna use this series to talk a little bit more about how to make it, how to stop, how to do finishes so that you don't have dusting, how to make it durable against termite problems, some of the things that we've seen arise or flooding, you know, people that, the things that we've seen that people have had issues with over the years with earthen building that might deter them from doing it. We wanna talk about what ways have evolved to develop it to the best it can be right now. In the past, we make a lot of mistake. And in the same time, we discover many good techniques too. So I think this is very important experience that we want to share with more people who are interested about natural building. I think it's good that people can learn from us, but they don't need to copy us. They just learn from us and develop it to make it better, easier, cheaper, stronger. I feel like it will be the best way to develop our shelter. Yeah, I think that, you know, every time, every single time we build, we learn something new. And so we'll definitely be learning through this process as well. But there's a lot of things that have been learned throughout the, so it's been building about 30 years, myself about 20 years, and using, we've used a lot of different materials over time too. We've done some earthship and straw bale and wattle and daub, wattle and cob. We'll talk about a lot of these different techniques. We usually, we often come back to Adobe, which is the sun-dried brick method. As for us in our climate and where we are, it just makes the most sense. And it's, we find it's easy to work with as well as. Yeah, I think one thing is interesting that even kids still build their own house easily. And then the oldest people that I found who built their own earthen house is 73 years old. So it's not limited to the age of people. I think it's important to think about anybody who can play Lego. You can build a house easily. Yeah, we've been lucky enough to learn from a lot of other groups that did building as well in Thailand because we've been a part of those different networks and seen how other people take the techniques and adapt them and then how we adapt onto that. And it's something that's been around for centuries, right? And it's still evolving. And I think that that's the beauty of it. Yeah, I think we learn a lot. We develop a lot in the past that we have been doing earthen house because we are the first group who started in this era. But we don't want people to copy us. We want people to discover it. That's why there are many people who experiment new thing and then new technique. And then we learn from each other more and more. I feel like now in Thailand, we have so many things that we discover to make it easier and easier. For example, like a painting. In the past, we did a lot of experimenting, but now we found that even rubber sack, we can make paint from it. So I feel when more people experiment more thing and we learn from each other, we learn more easy and cheap techniques. And it's also just a continuation of a conversation about how we can learn to build so that people can take this and add onto it and evolve it into the things that we're still working out as well. But as a whole, we still just believe that even with any of the difficulties or things we're still developing around earth and building, we love it so much and have really always felt that we've been living in earthen homes for the past 20, 30 years and wouldn't choose to live in any other kind of home because the way it feels, the way it works with the climate, the way the kind of empowerment people get from learning to build and that process and everything about that, we still just really love. When we finish the earthen building, our thinking will be changed. That's very interesting because it empower people a lot. Before that, we think that, oh, life is so hard to have a house if you don't have a good job, you make not a lot of money, you cannot have a house. But when you do earthen house, even you have a little bit of money, you can make a very nice house and then it empower us a lot. That's why we want to share more workshop, to do more workshop. We want people to experience this feeling, the empowering feeling. We hope that through this series, you can see the ease of building with earth and how easy it is, how simple it is, and also understand these a few critical things that really work to help make it long lasting and work in the long-term future.