THE EARTHSHIP HUT BUILD: 20 VOLUNTEERS, 14 DAYS AND $5,000 USD BUDGET! DAY 1:
In my last post I shared some video footage of the first day so you could see the faces and the vibe of this workshop. Now I will share the actual story with you! The idea for this workshop came during a chat with the owner of Karuna, a small off grid community and guest house that I live in in India. Nevil needed to make a new labour hut for our workers, and wanted to make something very small, cheap, and with basic functionality. His normal approach to this would be to use mud and stones and make something that is solid, but without much in the way of functionality or climate. The mud huts that I have seen here are very damp, and mold is alway an issue during winter. I used to live in one and I always got ill with a cold or flu during winter, and there was not much I could do to improve it since it was uninsulated and didn't have enough sunlight or large enough windows to heat up the thermal mass. So I very quickly came up with the idea of not only building him a small Earthship Hut instead, but also to do it using Volunteers and to do it in two weeks! It was a very exciting idea for me because teaching people and spreading this knowledge is only really possible when we are actually building something, and that seems to happen so rarely!
We got the whole community involved on this workshop, and i started my outreach using Facebook to invite people from all over the world to join us. The response was pretty amazing, and within a few weeks I had a long list of people from nearly all the continent's of the world wanting to come and join us for this build. We charged a minimal amount that would cover their food and accommodation, which was not much in India at around $150 per week, and people could stay one or two weeks. I also got very busy locating tyres, which in India can be a challenge. It's not that there aren't plenty or tyres in India, but what has happened is that they have started using them in furnaces to burn and melt things like sugar. This is probably one of the worst things you can do with tyres, and you can be sure they are not filtering or cleaning the gases that are released. So, since there was a high demand on tyres, the prices had gone up to as much as $1 per tyre. Whilst this is still pretty cheap in terms of what they are going to provide us with, I made a concerted effort to call around and find a good price. We needed around 600 tyres in total ranging in size from R15 down to R14 (these are around 12-16 inches in diameter). Finally by the magic of Google i had a good chat with someone in Coimbatore who spoke good English and sounded trustworthy. I wasn't going to meet him since that involved a 10 hour drive round trip, and wouldn't really be of much use. SO i gave him the sizes I wanted and the number and he promised me that he would have them delivered in time for the workshop. I paid half the money upfront and said my prayers!
I visited the site to check out the measurements and it seemed clear that the site was much too small to fit the hut on. The land in this area consists of many long beds that step up and down the mountains. They were used for agriculture many years ago and so the beds are only 10 -15 feet wide. Therefore, on one side of the house was a 10 foot height step that could be leveled down to increase the area of the plot. On the other side was a 20 foot sheer drop to the next level of beds below, which could be raised using tyres to extend the site. In the end we did a bit of both. Our Nepali workers spent a good two weeks digging the cliff edge out which provided a plentiful supply of dirt and stones. It was slow work though, and so we decided that we would extent the other edge a full 10 feet using tyres to give us enough room to build. Extending a plot and retaining it on the edge of a cliff is something that normally costs a lot of money, requires a lot of stones, or cement, and may not have a very long lifetime even when done well! When we use tyres to retain the edge of an existing or new level things change radically! We were able to use around 150 tyres to extend the entire 30 foot length of this plot a full 10 feet out in just a few days and using zero cement. That retaining wall is going to last forever, will have no issue with cracking or subsiding due to the fact that they have a large base and are held by gravity and they are VERY heavy indeed! They also lean IN to the plot so they will never topple over. I have seen stone walls crumble during just one monsoon season, whereas ALL the tyre retaining walls and paths that we have put even 10 years ago look exactly the same now as they did when they were built! The only difference is that roots and plants have tied everything in even more! SO it's fair to sat that these tyre retaining walls seem to get even stronger with time!
My prayers for tyres we answered and JUST in the nick of time! I waited and waited for a few weeks, and he kept assuring me that he was working on it, but it was taking time. The final week came before the workshop was due to start and STILL no tyres! I was getting really nervous and very stressed out because people were flying in from all over the world and India to do this, and without tyres we wouldn't even be able to start! In the end this truck arrived literally 24 hours before the entire group did! I was a nervous wreck before we even started with all this waiting and planning going on. Finally when everyone arrived I was feeling less than stellar, but VERy happy to see SO many fully enthusiastic and bright faces! 
The 600 tyres lay at the entrance of Karuna, which is about a 15 minute trek down steep and stony paths to the location of the Earthship Hut. Despite this, tyres are one of the easiest and quickest things to bring on site, especially if you have a few hands. Two people can carry 5-10 tyres on a stick, and with a team of 20-40 people we had ALL the tyres down on the site by lunch time. Try doing that by hand with sacs of cement, stones or clay! It would take us weeks and even months to shift enough stones and cement for a normal build in this location, and this added a big cost to the total build. Earthships can be made with virtually ANY kind of dirt or earth and so you don;t need to transport it to the site. Usually once you have finished leveling, digging and preparing the site you have enough earth to do the whole job. ALL you need is tyres and you have everything you need to build an Earthship foundation and main load bearing walls. It's worth bearing in mind that these tyre walls are also your heating system for LIFE, and so the low cost of using tyres combined with the lifetime savings and effort of not having to heat your house is just one compelling reason why we use tyres when building Earthships.
Right now in Jan 2018 there is a brand new Earthship called Earthship Sheppey that has just been completed and the owners have now moved in after a long and very successful self build. I joined them as a volunteer and worked with 
Day 1 was of course a blast! I will let you watch this movie to see some of the fun. The main work was to level the ground so that each tyre would be the same height after it has been pounded and filled until rock solid with dirt. It is a bit of a fiddly job when you don't have the same size tyres, but it is not that hard. We basically leveled the ground and then pounded the tyres full. We placed a string marker all around the whole site to show us what the final height of this first foundation course was. Then if the tyre was too high we would lift it up and dig some dirt from the ground to lower it. If it was too low we could either pound some stones into the tyre to raise it up a bit, or add some dirt underneath the tyre if it was very low. We also changed out some tyres for bigger ones when they were very low which was often easier than trying to make one that was very small fit. you can see this in the video!
To prevent dampness and water seepage we lay a plastic and tar based membrane under the first tyre foundation and wrapped that up the outside of the wall for a few feet. This provides a permanent seal that should prevent many problems such as mold and dampness since water will simply not be able to pass through. If you are building in many countries you would need to use a much better material such as EPDM membrane which is made of rubber and has a much longer lifetime than tar or plastic! It does cost more, but it is the best option when in a damp area.
SO, Here is what we needed to start building an Earthship. As you can see, this list is pretty amazingly simple and cheap!
- A PLAN!
- 600 OLD CAR TYRES
- DIRT & STONES FROM THE SITE EXCAVATION
- SLEDGE HAMMERS
- SHOVELS
- BUCKETS
- CARDBOARD
- WATERPROOF MEMBRANE
- A LONG PIECE OF STRING
- SPIRIT LEVEL
- SOME WOOD FOR WINDOWS FRAMES AND DOOR
I find it pretty mind blowing that we can make a house that is stronger and performs better in almost every way using these simple materials! Not only that but an Earthship will have a much longer lifetime and less maintenance than almost any other kind of house made from strong industrial materials like reinforced concrete and stone etc. I find it equally mind blowing that we were doing this with no employed skilled labour. Talk about turning things on their head! And to cap it all off, we were going to do this in just two weeks.. If you were building anything else you would still be waiting for the concrete foundation to dry!
So I hope you enjoy this short video. Sorry it isn't the best, but it does give you a sense of things!
I hope i have managed to inspire you today! Please do let me know if I did as that really helps me to know that these posts are reaching you!
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