They built an earthship home & it's gorgeous!

Here is the south facing wall of the Earthship. The sun comes in through the windows and will hit the back tire wall and warm up that thermal mass. We have the bottle wall behind me. This was like a vision that I had from the beginning. What do we have time for if it's not to like reclaim this birthright, to build our own homes, to live off-grid, to live sustainably, to be stewards of the Earth. I kept all the records of everything spent from like gas for the generator, to food for work parties, to all of our materials. Hi, I'm Goldie. Hi, I'm Matt. And we're excited to show you our Earthship. Come back up. Look at the camera. I knew that I wanted to build an Earthship. I had gone to the Earthship Academy in Argentina in 2014 and had my life's dream set on building an Earthship. I was already well on my way to that life when I met Matt. She told me about Earthships and I thought it was a cool idea and a cool way to spend my time. We did modify our plans so we have a modified Earthship. We used most of the Earthship principles. Rainwater catchment and water recycling, building out of recycled materials. We have all the passive solar, the glazing, the thermal mass, and we have the tire foundations. It took two years to do the tires. Two summers. Those were the fun days when all you had to do was like put dirt in a tire and keep going. And then when construction set in, real conventional roof construction and plumbing and electric, it was kind of like I felt stuck in some of our processes of building because you have to wear so many hats. You have to be an electrician and a plumber and a framer. All of our labor was work trade. You know people would come over and help. I kept all the records of everything spent from like gas for the generator to food for work parties to all of our materials. We bought the land for $16,000. Our well and septic were about $10,000. We spent around I say like $110,000 back when prices were much cheaper. I think if we were to build it again it might cost $200,000. $250,000. We built out of pocket and I think it's like that saying you know choose your heart. Like sure it's hard to build out of pocket and have a job while you're building your house, but it's also hard to be a victim of a mortgage and like the grind. And I think being really resourceful helps. We saved so much money getting all of these used glass panels. All the flagstone we got out of a backyard. Saved on material costs but took days and days of extra work to do so. It takes a lot of effort to make old stuff look good. Free stuff isn't necessarily free. It took us five years to build the house start to finish and we've been living in it now for over two years. This was like a five-year art project that we did basically. And it's still not done right? It's never gonna be. We're never done you know. You know. Yeah. Here we are at the outside of our earth ship. It is 50 feet long by 13 feet tall and 35 feet deep. Here is the south facing wall of the earth ship. It has all of the glass windows to get the solar gain. We went with the vertical glass on the earth ship. The other option is doing the slanted glass but this is the faster, easier, cheaper way to design the house. You can see the operable windows that are open up there. That helps with the airflow so that's letting all the hot air out of the house. As the hot air is leaving those vents, cool air is being brought in from the cooling tubes inside. So we did go with an overhang on our roof on the south side which earth ships don't conventionally do. That is a pro and a con. The con is that we don't get as much sun into the greenhouse in the summertime but it also helps keep the temperatures cooler in the summer. Here we are on the back side of our earth ship. This is the north side. What we have here is what we refer to as the berm. Since we're out in the flatlands we had to bury our earth ship so we brought in all this dirt. It butts up against the back side of the tires. Right here we have the back end of our cooling tube so you can see there is where the cool air gets brought in through that. We have a 2,000 square foot roof that we catch all the rainwater off. It is a 2 in 12 pitch which is standard for earth ships so that when snow is melting it doesn't melt too fast to overflow the system. So water is directed from the south to the north and then from gutters into the 1,700 gallon cistern where we catch and store all of the rainwater. Here we are on the east side of our house. This is a tire wing wall they call it. So this wraps around from the inside of the house and is holding the berm wall back. So these are all tires you can see how they step up. Let's head on inside. Here we are in the greenhouse. So this is a traditional double greenhouse earth ship design however this is actually 16 feet wide. Normally earth ships are only 15 feet deep in total on their own and that is because on the winter solstice the sun is low in the sky and the sun comes in through the windows and will hit the back tire wall and warm up that thermal mass. So because we modified the design the sun doesn't come in all the way into that back room but we still do get a lot of the benefits of having this double wall of glass so it kind of creates two different zones of the house. Extending the greenhouse really just gave us a lot more space. This has become kind of more of a social zone. It's a great place to host people. I really love the natural light and in the winter when it's really cold outside and you can be like sunbathing in your own greenhouse it's really awesome. I spent a whole summer up in Denver collecting free sliding glass door replacements. Challenging part with that is that we then had to custom frame every single window because they're all different sizes but definitely saved thousands of dollars on glass by finding these. So you can see this is where the tire wall ends. So the adobe plastered part of the wall is actually tires and then that meets this conventionally framed wall. So I like to just put bottles and mud in any space that was kind of like a transition zone because it's really easy to shape to the wall and to form it and it's pretty so I did that in a lot of spaces. All right let's head to the other side of the greenhouse. So this is a gray water planter cell. That's another standard earthship design and it's just such a genius way to use gray water. Typically with earthships the bathroom sink and the shower get funneled into a gray water planter cell. The water is channeled from one side to the other with just a slope bed and the water gets filtered through the plant roots and the gravel that's on the bed of the system and then that water once it's filtered gets used to flush the toilet and then it goes out typically into a black water planter cell that's outside. So it's one of the great ways that earthships use rainwater catchment multiple times which makes so much sense for our climate because we're in the desert and we get around maybe 10 to 12 inches of rainwater a year. This fig tree is actually fruiting right now and we get a couple harvests off of this a year which is exciting and the rubber plant which is a staple in earthships because of the tires. I'm more into like the herbs and the ornamentals. We don't so much grow a lot of food in here but I do have a potato harvest. It's funny because in earthships the seasons are kind of switched because in the summer when the sun is high in the sky because of the vertical glass and the roof overhang we don't get a ton of sun directly coming in in the summertime. So the winter is when all the sun is beaming into this area so the plants are kind of switched where like the fruiting of the plants happens in the winter instead of in the summer. So this is the bath area of the house which is my favorite zone. This was really important to me to have an open air bathing zone which is like in the greenhouse. I just really like this feel. This was my 30th birthday present from my mom. She got me this incredible tub and got it refinished in copper penny is the color. I spend a lot of time in here. The ceiling in this room it came from a mistake because I accidentally ordered too much roofing metal for our roof so we had all this extra so we just used it in here and it's kind of nice because it reflects the light really nicely so that was like a happy mistake that happened. We have the bottle wall behind me. This was like a vision that I had from the beginning of just having like an all blue bottle wall so that was a really fun endeavor knowing years in advance that I wanted to have that so I definitely drank a bunch of the certain type of kombucha that comes in that bottle, found friends who like certain types of gin, and also found dumpsters for glass recycling and spent a lot of time pulling prized jewel bottles out of the trash. Bottle walls are definitely a labor of love. They take so much work because you have to collect the bottles, cut the bottles, wash the and then use some kind of mortar to get them in place. It takes days and days to you know bring them up to this high but at the end it's just like you end up with this incredible wall that I think is so beautiful. Another fun experiment was this countertop that I made out of the blue bottle glass shards. I just made the base for this and then epoxied it. Also this shower wall, basically it's like a rebar frame that I covered in metal lath and I wanted to put tiny bottles into so it's kind of this like miniature bottle wall stucco framed shower. I wanted more of a textured shower floor you know kind of get that foot massage reflexology while you're showering which was nice. We used a composting toilet while we were building but now that we're plumbed in inside we've got our toilet that uses the gray water. All right so let's head over to the bedroom. So this is our bedroom. This is where a lot of trial runs happened. This was the first adobe floor that we did. Also the first walls that we finished with the earthen plaster. These have the gold mica in them too so they're a little sparkly. I love the ceiling in this room because it is all laminate flooring that we got out of the dumpsters or left over at job sites. This bottle wall is the first one that I did in the house. It has the little lucky buddha bottles in it. Right here is actually one of the only conventionally framed that is a drywall wall. We wanted somewhere to be able to like hang things and have hooks and the adobe is a little bit harder to do that in if you don't pre-plan where you're going to put stuff. Say you knew you wanted to put shelving in here it would have been easier to do had we known in the beginning and we would have just put two by fours onto the tires and then adobe or plastered up to them. But at this point if we were going to install shelves we would have to chisel out this plaster to get it in the right spot. This is our mechanical room. Our house is off grid and so I put the charge controller meter out here so you could see it easily from the living room. Check on the batteries. Living off grid takes work. You need to you know be in touch with your systems. So if you come into here these are our batteries. L16s, 48 volt systems, two series of eight batteries, inverter, charge controller, hot water system, pressure tank, mechanical room. And you know it doesn't seem like much. This is our AC panel here but it took a lot for me to understand all this and get it really dialed in and ironed out and really just proud of that work. Another cool feature of our house is obviously we live in a tire house and so before we had the walls covered with earth and plaster we had everyone's names who helped us and we have over 650 tires in our house. And so when we started covering our tires we were covering our friends names and we actually just wound up writing everyone's name in this room from every tire we could see. And they're all hidden and there's a lot of you know it's in pink now and we're kind of losing it but you're all here in spirit and we can see you. And this is what we call a truth wall in alternative building. Here we are in the living space. When I was thinking about living in a house and what I wanted out of a home it was really important to me to have a good size space for gathering because community and family is such a big part of my life. So I really wanted a nice open floor plan with lots of room for gathering. So that's the idea for this room. We have a lot of musicians in the family, Matt especially. So this is kind of the creative zone of the home. Bass, guitar, piano. Oh this is a cool one. Matt made me this drum. It's a one of those tongue drums made out of propane tanks. This is a cooling tube. We have three of them in our house and it is part of the cooling system for the Earthship design. Basically it's a 20 foot tube that extends out of our greenhouse through the berm. And in the summer we open these doors up and it lets air come into the tube. It gets cooled as it moves through the earth and then flows into the house. And actually I'm standing here next to it and I can feel a really gentle cool breeze coming in and that's because we have those windows open in the greenhouse. So it's moderating the airflow and the temperature in here. It's really awesome because it's not like AC. It's not forced air. It's just a natural flow which really adds to like this really comfortable environment in the Earthship. There's no moving parts. There's no mechanics to this. I either have the door open or the doors closed. And if it's open it's flowing. It's circulating and functioning. So nothing to worry about breaking down with that. It's just nature. Oh this is Sparkle. We adopted him about halfway through building this house and he's become the best construction dog ever. And Frankie. Frankie come here. We're just hanging out with Frankie for a few weeks but she fits right in down here. Perfect desert dog. All right moving from the living room into the kitchen. So again this is a big open layout. Very spacious. No room dividers or anything. That was important to me. So we went with a cement based tile based floor for the kitchen because it is more high traffic. It's you know more susceptible to spills and water and stuff like that. So adobe floors are beautiful and amazing and have their place in a home. So we put it specifically in the less danger zone part of the house. It's a fairly standard kitchen honestly like compared to what you would find in any home. I love all the cabinet space. I would love to have more. There's just you know maybe never enough. And here we are at the back part of the property and this is what I call my mini earthship. A lot of people would have built something like this first to start but I did it backwards and did it after we finished our house just kind of as a extra guest room. I used a lot of our extra leftover materials from our house on this one. It is built with three courses of tires and then three courses of straw bale on top so it's kind of a hybrid earthship thing. Still has the south facing glass and the bottle walls and post and beam framing. What I super loved about building this one was it's everything we did on our earthship but smaller. I just was able to actually do all of the work myself and that felt really good. So here we are in the mini earthship. The dimensions are 14 by 12 so around 180 square feet ish. What we put back here was a rocket mast stove so that's a really awesome feature of this place. For those of you that don't know about rocket stoves these are a super efficient way to heat a space and what happens is we build a fire in here. This is the fire box and this model is called a j channel so the fire is in the shape of a j the chimney and basically what happens is you build the fire there it comes up there's a tube inside of this barrel and the heat comes up it hits the top of the barrel and then comes back down the exterior barrel and then is directed into the bench and so this bench is made out of cob and adobe and then has a tadillac plaster on the exterior so the heat gets directed throughout the entire bench the bench stores the heat and keeps all of the heat in the space and then releases that heat for hours so it's a really awesome form of heating a space. And so as you can see this firebox is really small so you're really only using things that would normally probably be used as kindling and it takes a really small amount of wood to get this whole thing heated up. Really anyone can do this if you put your mind to it it's going to be really hard I mean it's the hardest thing that I ever did and it's also the most rewarding thing. The fact that we get to sit here now and be in this place and without a mortgage it's for me a dream come true and if someone really wants that it's going to be really hard and it's going to be so worth it on the other end. I hear a lot you know I would love to do a nurse trip but I don't have the time or I would love to build a sustainable house but it's just I don't have experience I want to challenge that for people. What do we have time for if it's not to like reclaim this what I think is a birthright to build our own homes to live off grid to live sustainably to be stewards of the earth to be in control of and in love with our own lives. Hi I'm Matt and I'm Goldie. Welcome to our house. Nope. It's an earth ship. We want to welcome you to our earth ship. I don't say that. Stick to the script. Are you excited to show our home? We should have made a blueprint. Are you excited? Floor plan. Matt focus. Hi I'm Matt and I'm Goldie. Welcome to our earth ship. We're excited to show you. What the f*** you blew that? You're supposed to say we're excited to show you our earth ship. That's not my line. And I say. I can't be my line. Hi my name's Matt and I'm Goldie. Welcome to our earth ship.