We Complete Our MASSIVE Earthbag Wall

This week on OSRL we complete the earthbag wall for our house. This is the final exterior wall and one of the more labor-intensive parts of the build. How's it going everyone? Welcome back to the domestead. Now if you're new here my wife Jessica and I... bingo! We're building our own home off-grid here in the Arizona desert. Now if you caught our last video you know we made some major progress on our massive earthbag wall and we are looking to finish that in this video. So Jess is out here right now and some pretty warm weather with a black shirt on ready to knock out the barbed wire. Our house is built with a mix of different materials and for the final wall we decided to go Now this ain't our first rodeo. We've built with earthbags a number of times before. Our first project was an outdoor table or bar. Our next project was a large earthbag cistern lined with a pond liner supported by a gabion rock wall and topped with ferrocement. There are a few other sections of our house that we've also built with earthbags. There's an underground earthbag room with a large earthbag dome on top of it and an earthbag root cellar which unfortunately collapsed during a flood and then we had to rebuild about half of it. All right so we are about to head out into town. There are a few things that we need to pick up before we start on this next set of bags. So we're going to take care of that before we get to building. So a little trip into town. Unfortunately we're going to need the backspace of the Tahoe so we can't bring Yuvia with us. We have to leave her back at the homestead. It's heartbreaking but it's what we got to do. All right what do you feel what do you think Jess? You ready? Yep. All right let's rock and roll. It's rock and roll. Autobots. Autobots roll out. At this point we're pretty comfortable building with earthbags but this final wall is a bit challenging due to its design. It's a 20 foot diameter half circle with a dividing wall in the middle. There are two doorways and because of this we decided to add four buttresses to give extra support. This part of the house will have two rooms. One will be a bathroom accessible from the outside and with a shower that makes it easier to wash a big dusty dog. The other side will be a pantry with built-in shelving. So we have been absolutely having some crazy weather. We had quite a bit of That brought on some cold weather. In fact yesterday the highs were in the 60s and this morning it got down to like the mid 30s which is kind of crazy for this time of year. We also got a little bit of rain. Very much needed. So we didn't get much probably not even a tenth of an inch but it was a little something and it was kind of nice to get. But things are about to warm up. Today's probably going to be in the high 70s and the next few days it's going to be mid 80s. So we got some nice warm weather to get this work done. Again we got three courses to do and I think we can act this out and we can finally finish this wall. Very exciting. We chose to use earth bags for this build for a number of reasons. One was cost. The bags we're using are misprinted polypropylene feed or seed bags that we purchased at a discount for our other earth bag projects. Since we still had bags left over we didn't need to buy any for this wall. The earth we're using comes from our property. We're fortunate to have subsoil with the right amount of clay in it to build a really solid stable wall without needing to add a stabilizer like cement. All we need to add is water so no additional cost for that. The only things we had to purchase for this wall build was a roll of barbed wire which goes between courses of bags and acts as a mortar and a little lumber we put between bags to act as shelf brackets for our pantry. Before building our wall we needed a foundation to put it on. We chose a gravel foundation for our entire house. We used large bags and filled them with gravel and stacked them around the perimeter of the house. We double bagged them to make them extra strong. This foundation will keep the walls up off the ground and help to keep them dry. Time for loving before the work begins. Some special time for mama. You're never gonna get to work if this keeps up. All right good morning y'all. So we are about to get at it. Course number 15. I figure we only got about maybe a few more courses left to do so this is very exciting. We're going to slightly smaller bags than we have been using but we are ready to get started. Now this morning I've already been out here working and I've been cutting up these metal straps. Kind of weaving it in under the barbed wire and we'll be using these as sort of like the hurricane straps. Kind of tying this roof down to the bags. We'll actually be doing like a few courses on top of these straps and then tying it to the rafters. So I actually got 11 of them on there right now. I don't know if we'll be doing any more but I got 11 up there right now which I think should be plenty. How do you feel? You ready to get at it? Before laying down our first bags for this wall we made door forms. These will be removed later but during the building process they create a space for our doors to later go into while making a solid surface to stack the bags neatly against. Already got the north side done under an hour. Filled and even tamped. I mixed up more dirt and we're ready to go. We still got half a container here that we're using. Time to knock out the east side which is like maybe four or five bags. Hit the south and next course done. So we're rocketing right along. A lot of earth bag builds have three or more people working together. We found a way to work with just two people. Jim shovels dirt into a wheelbarrow, removes any large rocks and adds water. He then wheels the dirt over to the wall. We scoop the dirt out with coffee cans and I dump the cans of dirt into bags. Once a bag is filled I lay it down horizontally. The bags are laid much like bricks in courses and staggered. After we lay a full course of bags Jim tamps them. Tamping down the moist dirt is how we turn bags of squishy dirt into solid blocks which dry and become a rock hard wall. After tamping I stick barbed wire into the bags. The barbed wire goes between each course to mortar the bags together and it gives tensile strength to the wall. All right final bag course 15. Good job. Course 15 already done before lunch. Not as many bags so it went quick. 16 bags. Filled, tamped, but we're not done yet. So after lunch we're gonna get back out here. I gotta put the cleats on. She's gotta do the barbed wire and then we're gonna knock out course 16 right away today. So this will be the first time we're doing two courses in one day. As we built up this wall we placed wood pieces in between some of the courses. For the pantry we put boards that will eventually hold our pantry shelves. We also put wood pieces called velcro plates or cleats next to the doorways to make it easier to attach the door frames. All right Jess is out putting up the last of the barbed wire. Looking good Jess. Meanwhile I got the cleats in place. The dirt's ready to go and we're ready to knock out the next course here in a little bit. Very exciting. Last bag of course 16. Let's double check see if we even need to do any more courses because this it's getting close. All right well it looks like we are finished. You know when we started this I was thinking it was going to be 14 courses and I was thinking oh well we're not going to need we might need more than that and maybe it's going to be 17. Maybe we're going to need a few more courses. I mean there is a little bit of gap there. There's a little bit of room than where I intended but the thing is this side needs to be a little higher a little bit higher than that side. So if I put another course of bags here that's going to pretty much eliminate any wiggle room I have to So by not doing this other course I'm going to leave myself a little little room to kind of play with and make sure I just get just a slightest bit of slope. We're going to be putting a covering over this so what I don't want to do is have anything running from east to west toward the house so if it rains I don't want rain backing up into this house that would be bad. So if it can just kind of slightly run away from the house perfect that's what we want. I say we're done. You checked it out. You concur. You are not at all sad that we're stopping right here right? I'm okay with it. So this is it. The wall is finished. Of course more still to come after this but I can focus on those next steps so obviously I'll have to put a covering over this so more roofing going in but there's going to be a slight difference to what we're doing here and I'm very excited about that so the covering over here will kind of be double duty but I don't know if we've talked about that before but we will definitely talk about what's going on with this. I'm very excited about that and then I'll be able to push on with the rest of this roof over here putting the metal on the top then putting the panels on the top of the greenhouse and I think we'll be kind of pretty much closed in. Yeah. You excited? I'm excited. All right. I think this is a well this wall especially that's a pretty big accomplishment. Yeah I think when we had an idea for this wall you know I was thinking it wouldn't be too bad but it's actually a pretty big ordeal. A lot of work. A lot of bags but uh we're there. You know so now that we've completed the massive earth bag wall over here I'm just looking at the dirt we have left and we are we're running kind of low. We just got this small mound left and you know I'm thinking back to when we started. When we started we had this little mound of dirt was probably at least 10 feet high probably 40 feet long plus several other satellite dirt piles all around this place. You can actually tell where the dirt started by this raised area of ground over here but this is probably where the dirt started then goes all the way back over there to that tiny dirt pile. It's about 40 feet long but we've used that dirt and those satellite dirt piles for the cistern for the two underground rooms for the big earth bag dome back there and then of course the dirt wall. Not to mention all the cob work we've done over the years. You know it's just quite the change to the property during this amount of time. So we had all that dirt dug up and now it's all getting put to use and it's almost gone. Of course once the dirt's gone we still got plenty of rocks left to use but I'm sure we'll be using that for gabions or any other kind of projects we got around here. Definitely a lot of uses for the rocks. Look at this most of this just came out of the recent digging over here for this dirt so yeah we've come a really long way. It's really exciting to see how this all turned out. All right so you know I don't think we say it enough but uh really thank you to everyone that's come along with us on this journey. It's always nice to reflect when you hit a milestone like this and accomplish a big part of the project. Knocking that out just to give thanks to all of you for sticking with us on this journey and it has been a journey and we're still moving along but thank you for all your support. We really appreciate it. Definitely give this video a big thumbs up for finally finishing on our massive earth bag wall and uh yeah we'll catch in the next video y'all.