Tiny House Living

Dr. Owen Geiger, the Director of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building, posted one of my design concepts on his Earthbag Building Blog. I had whipped this design up for a 1 Hour Design Challenge at Core77, in exactly 1-hour using Google SketchUp. Thanks for all the earthbag inspiration Owen!

Earthbag & Pallet Emergency Shelter

Core77 ran a 1-hour design competition looking for designers to spend literally one hour on an emergency shelter concept. I’m not sure if what I came up with is technically a ‘pop-up shelter’ as the competition asks for but it was fun to put this earthbag and pallet hybrid concept together in an hour.

1 Hour Design Challenge

If you have a subscription to Mother Earth News you probably spotted this cute earthbag building. While it’s small footprint (8-foot diameter) is probably too small to be a tiny house for most people it is an excellent example of how easy an earthbag home could be built.  There are lots of books and plans for earthbag homes available but you can find a lot of information on the internet about building with earthbags online.

This is a short article on a simple earthbag root celler. The earthbag building blog is a great resource for learning about building earthbag homes. You can also read about this root celler and how it is used by the family that built it.

There’s a nice slide show style video on the Earthbag Building Blog that illustrates the steps needed to build an earthbag dome home. If building homes with earthbags is new to you watching this short video will provide a quick overview.

When you’re done looking at that video there’s another earthbag dome home video on YouTube from the folks at Cal-Earth that also shows the earthbag building process.

The folks at natural homes are very clever at putting together new ways of viewing and exploring the world of tiny houses. This is an example of an earthbag slide show. Earthbag homes are home literally built from bags of dirt. The bags are stacked up in strait of curved walls. Domes and arches are also possible. Visit Earthbag Building Blog to learn more about building earthbag homes. Visit natrual homes to watch the earthbag home slide show.

The folks over at naturalhomes.org have put together a nice summary of 10 tiny natural tiny homes that they’ve come across over time. These homes are all made from things like strawbales, cob, and earthbags and they are from all around the world too.

Another very cool feature on the natural homes website is a tiny house map. At the moment there are 29 tiny houses mapped and I’m sure they will add more over time. Be sure to bookmark naturalhomes.org and if so inclined follow naturalhomes on Twitter.

Until I learned to use Google SketchUp I would often built models of tiny houses I was day dreaming about building. I actually made several models of Nine Tiny Feet until I started drawing 3D drawings of how I imagined fitting a whole house in nine square feet.

When I saw this article on earthbag house model building I realized I wasn’t alone. The truth is taht no matter what drawing tools you use, it is very helpful to build models especially for small structures. Visualizing an idea is not always easy to do and it’s much faster to work out ideas in modeling clay, cardboard, or foam core. Also visit EarthbagBuilding.com for more on model building.