Best Home Tours of 2021! 10+ Unique Earthship Inspired Homesteads

happy new year everybody i've been thinking that it's time for reflection so for this video i'm taking a break from my usual content to bring you a compilation of all the best videos that i released in 2021 i've done my best to make this video entertaining for newcomers and returning viewers alike choosing the order carefully to make it feel like one long adventure each story flowing into the next we are going to start with a series of inspirational home tours in the southwest then go to taos new mexico to build an off-grid earthship tiny house and conclude with an inspirational father and son story in pennsylvania that sparked a radically off-grid building movement and it's a long one my longest video yet so i've introduced time stamps which allow you to skip ahead or go back to a specific point in the video each chapter is labeled in the description below and also in the video's timeline and don't worry this isn't a marathon with intros and advertisements and subscribe now after every break i've cut out all the fluff and just left the good stuff i'm only going to ask you once for your support and that's right now because my new year's goal for the year 2022 is to reach 10 000 subscribers and if what i do inspires you then please consider subscribing and don't forget to turn on notifications if you want to know every time a video is released and lastly as always you can reach me in the comments section below i'd love to hear what you think about the video your support is greatly appreciated thank you grab your popcorn sit down get ready and enjoy the movie they're so big and after that we became awesome i couldn't drink because i did this up next i'm going to the american southwest the birthplace of the self-sufficient earthship housing movement i'll be touring off-the-grid houses of all shapes and sizes from classic designs to wild fantasy homes including a special tour of one of the original earthships built by pioneers of the movement who literally created the earthship academy i got to say this earthship that i'm about to give you a tour of is a truly inspirational story and example of how determination and hard work over a long time can lead to your dreams being actualized this particular house was built by kirsten jacobson who is the former educational director and creator of the earship academy at airship biotecture in the greater world new mexico i mean i really can't say enough about what kirsten has done for this movement this though is the story of her beginnings when she first came out here and was inspired to build her own home she started off small and then over years built her house out and so this is the final product of her years of work that she now rents out on airbnb we were able to come in when there was a gap in the schedule and spend a night here and just before i leave i wanted to walk through the house and show you around let's check it out [Music] okay [Music] so welcome welcome to one of the most desired and uh acclaimed airships in the greater world community for its modern design the house has been featured by the smithsonian forbes and airbnb magazine and if you want to find this house on airbnb i'm going to have a link in the description it's called the taos earthship modern mesa you can also find it on kirsten's profile she is a super host she's been on airbnb for over 10 years and has two other earthships on there so you can go check her profile out as you can see it was a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of introducing some modern elements into the earthship interior design elements like a stainless steel kitchen countertop and and then also it's a quite a high ceiling structure and that makes it feel very roomy it also only has one pane of glass between you and the outside which is indicative of the earlier earthship models over here you can see the systems in the closet so this is your charge controller your main panels and the inverter that gives you ac electricity and then a few extra things like some compost and garbage can some nice built-in shelving that's not funky or crazy above with some adobe plastering in between this is a 1300 square foot building it's one bedroom and one bathroom and it was completed in 2006 the modern and mesa airship was built slowly in phases over eight years by your host kirsten the project started with the construction of a small hut dome room around 120 square feet the local size limit for a structure that may be built without a building permit so originally kirsten started by building the hut or a yurt which you can see in this room here [Music] so right now obviously it's just being used for storage yeah so the acoustics in this room are really cool because it's dome-shaped um there's one skylight in the middle which is operatable by a little rope that comes down but this was you know and still is remains one of the easiest ways to get yourself into a structure really quickly if you're an owner builder is just to build as small as you can and go bigger from there out of pocket rather than taking out a loan from the beginning depending on what your budget is and in this case the story was that you know a lot of these pioneers came out to the greater world and they built structures like this kirsten is an example of how she was able to create something very small and affordable in the beginning and then build off onto it [Music] so it's saying that the second structure that was built after the hut was uh the kitchen area with the french doors and then the third final addition was the bathroom planter cell and the bedroom and it was completed in 2006 and while kirsten might have done things the hard way she knows that that's not a right fit for everyone her company the eco-living matrix is committed to helping people find solutions that are right for them through online courses podcasts and ebooks she's hoping to help individuals find the right steps that they need to take towards a new off-grid lifestyle i think the coolest thing about this house has to be the bathroom [Music] she's created a beautiful clear glass bottle wall on the inside and outside of the bathroom partition which when you're in here taking a nice bath and the lights are on outside and you dim the lights in the bathroom you can see the bottles glowing like gems and then when you're inside the bathroom with the lights on and someone's out in the bedroom at night you can see the bottles glowing in the opposite direction which leaves for a really cool aesthetic effect [Music] and really just did a excellent job finishing off all of the bottle work because it is really hard to get a nice smooth surface [Music] i think the uh thing that's most beloved a lot of times about the aesthetic of our ships is the bottle walls and like i said this one really does a great job both from a layout standpoint and the craftsmanship of making the bottle wall itself and its simplicity that gravitates people back to this building over and over again for inspiration on how to do bottle walls in the future as well as the planter cell and the planter cell here is awesome and healthy with big banana trees and geraniums and aloe plants and a spider plant um yeah just really great feeling to have inside the home of plants and freshness and green um every time that you're you know taking a shower or running the sink you know that you're watering this indoor garden so this is personally my favorite aspect of the earthships [Music] and the best way to learn about earthships is by building one i created the earthship model kit to put an earthship in everyone's hands i took everything i learned from the airship academy and boiled it down into a simple and easy to understand 32 page full color booklet which has all new diagrams to help you learn about the six design principles that make earthship some of the most sustainable buildings in the world this great educational package has been used in both the earthship biotecture academy classroom and in classrooms around the world forgot to mention the water organizing module here which has filters necessary to filter rain water and an extra drinking water filter and then on-demand hot water heater and pressure tank so these blinds are great all the windows have them and they're really easy to operate so that is one thing that can be a problem with our ships is that they can get too much sun or the windows can be letting a little bit of cold through and so depending on you know what time of year it is and what the temperature is like you might want to close the blinds like we did when it got really cold and snowy outside and you might even want to close the blinds when there's sun but the thing about this airship that like i said is nice is that it's modern you know these blinds are nothing fancy but they really do the job and every single window has the same efficient awesome set of lines and then in the bedroom here so we got cool decorative lamps um the whole house has cool decorative lamps you can also see that the whole ceiling is just white you know and normally there's these big exposed vegas and that's a lot more work the the other difference with this building which is kind of cool is that you know obviously saves on expense and is a design detail you could choose to take it or leave it the bed basically just a modern bed plop down in the room and you can see here wood floors aside from the entire wall being adobe which is really impressive and you know has a great feel to it um everything else in here is just what you'd find in a normal modern apartment it's a really cool place i recommend it all right we gotta go from the older guru to the younger guru see you later there's a fun video log that goes along with this home tour that if you want to check it out my dad and i had a really interesting experience in this airbnb it's fun it's candid and if you want to have a good time take a look last year my dad and i caught up with some old friends who we haven't seen in eight years since we met them at the earthship biotecture academy in taos new mexico in 2012. like many others tom and debra were dreaming of the off-grid life and went to the earship academy with the hopes that they would learn the skills they needed to make their dreams into a reality since then traveling back and forth from arizona they bought land in crestone colorado and started building their first project was converting an old school bus into a hippie camper that they could live in while they started construction on the larger home the grand vision that they have is huge and it's going to take some time but as soon as they had a roof over their heads they started using the school bus to house volunteers who would help them build their future home it has become an ongoing community project and even though it's hard work most of the time they've made some lifetime friends in the process from visionary artists like their neighbor jeff who's been sculpting a masterpiece for the last 12 years to fellow off-grid dreamers like matt and pete who started as volunteers pounding tires and decided to buy land of their own down the street and start building their own home so in an unexpected twist my father and i found ourselves living in a hippie bus in creston colorado embracing the lifestyle of neighbor helping neighbor lending a hand where we were needed and making new friends and documenting the journey along the way so i'm going to be releasing home tours and interviews with all of the interesting people that we met but before that i'd like to start the journey off in the beginning uh meeting tom and catching up with his progress on the house and of course taking a look inside the hippie bus that him and his partner deborah built [Music] and i think or something [Music] do [Music] i had no idea what tom and debra had been up to all these years but man they really committed to a big project tom and deborah had never built their own house before and designed the home themselves drawing inspiration from the classic earthship designs we studied at the academy in taos among the many design changes was a cholestery roof which created a higher ceiling in the living spaces and let more light into the home [Music] while giving us a tour tom explained that almost all the materials they used were recycled or repurposed most of the windows and doors they got for free or bought secondhand for a great price the structural walls are built using old car tires rammed with dirt a technique that they learned at the earthship academy in the beginning of the project tom and deborah were living in the camper bus parked in front of the house they have since upgraded to living in their first enclosed room which allows them to spend the winters on site without constantly fighting to stay warm in the uninsulated school bus what are you doing i haven't gotten any footage in the bus yet you haven't gotten any what i haven't gotten any footage in the bus yet oh you're taking footage the project has been a massive undertaking so far and tom admitted that they might have bitten off a bit more than they can chew with winter coming fast they're currently rushing to finish the roof and close in the walls so during my stay tom put me to work and one of the first jobs that we did together was installing a waterproofing membrane on the roof in order to prepare for the insulation and metal roofing that was going to finish off the project and while we waited for some more materials to finish up the roof we decided to start closing in the sidewalls [Music] it was satisfying to put in a good hard day's work and in the evenings nature would bless us with some beautiful sunsets what are you taking movies in the morning we decide what job we were going to do for the day and some jobs are more exciting than others because when you're building it yourself every tiny detail takes time even the smallest job can take half a day like filling the small gap in the roof when you've been working on a project for so many years like tom has it's hard to get the motivation to just do little projects like this sometimes and it's just nice to have a friend around to lighten the load you know it might have been a small job but we had a fun time doing it and even though it can be overwhelming at times all you can ever do is the next step a big house is built one brick at a time [Music] while we were working i told tom about the youtube channel i was planning to create and he started to tell me all about the like-minded people that he met here over the last few years he started to introduce me to some of his neighbors who had also built their own off the grid homesteads tom was going to help his neighbor matt with a ceiling installation and could use some help matt and his partner were building an earthship nearby and i was eager to meet him he turned out to be a super cool dude and luckily for me he was also a trained emt because i ended up blowing a nail through my finger the first day i met him and after that we became friends and matt invited me back to his home to give me a tour of his crib when i arrived at matt's place we started off the day with one of my favorite activities thrown around the old frisbee [Music] so if you were wondering why matt's holding a frisbee in this shot and in this shot and in this shot now you know why anyways matt and his partner goldie have been hard at work for three years building their dream home the tour started when matt was explaining to me the big mess that he'd made in the yard over the years this is it this is it so far yeah um pretty cool this right here this mess this quan this is a a grain style it's actually that out there it's that in pieces um yeah one day all this mess will be gone i hope that's what i'm hoping there's you know we were living in that van for a while at the end of the driveway is how we like we started out sleeping in the back like a pickup truck with a camper on it goldie and i and then upgraded to the van and upgraded to her sister's camper trailer thing we had that we gave back and then yeah now we're yeah we got a bunch of stuff going on here this is our um the front of our house it's pretty it's pretty massive from the road we went bigger we did we started off with a simple survival but just went bigger then we should have you know our friend talked us into getting more space in there um maybe kind of defeats the uh the point of the earth ship without the the sun doesn't hit the back walls the tires but you know hopefully it functions yeah we did yeah we did all the stucco goldie and i and put a bathroom on the outside on the other side of the greenhouse um but we can you know go into the front door yeah all right we can alright yeah i'm matt um this is the house the earth ship that my partner goldie and i built together [Music] um yeah and here's here's a little tour right it's the greenhouse area here this is our earthship style uh planter we get this one above ground yeah we'll end up putting another pledge or so over here in the ground um just trying to get maximum like plants going on in here some trees uh our bathrooms out here on the eastern side of the house or the western side of the house my bad our septics out there um yeah luxury ceiling we're going fancy with the ceiling we're gonna do this is our shower it's a walk-in shower we'll do like you know like like a feral cement wall here or something maybe throw a bottle or two in if we get can get there but yeah it's just a walk-in shower um all tiles this will all be tiled sink goes here um toilet uh we just we just plastered this wall actually this was a tire wall so we're pretty pretty jazzed on this pretty jazz in the ceiling right now [Music] how'd you find creston she had already done the whole airship thing was kind of like always wanted to build an airship when i met her educated me on it we listened to a bunch of mike reynolds speeches and she brought me to creston and was like this is where you know i always wanted to do this and but i got here and i just like looked around and i was like wow this place it's not half that i could just you know i envisioned it i was like i saw it that's like this this this is it we can do this you know 2016 i first came here and we went to thomas and everest and i pounded my first tire sweet at thomas and deborah's okay so that's the that's the connection there so we were they were already like eight courses up you know you found your first time so my first tire was like on the eighth course of thomas and deborah's there'll be there'll be a bathtub here um definitely and maybe like some weird kind of awning thing over it maybe like a little place for a bed up there like a little guest little cozy nook or something um there's a door to our bedroom over there [Music] this is yeah like our living space pretty much is what we're you know calling it um this is our kitchen sink counters uh stove fridge uh island here like a movable island because we like open space my vision is like piano and then there'll be like a little couch area a place where you can stretch out we'll put a wood stove in here i'm a big fan of wood heat there's not a lot of wood here hopefully you don't have to use it much but it's nice just to like get some more heat going i just i love it um and then yeah so that'll be flagstone under here under where the wood stove is and then um you know rest of the floors are going to be earthen with radiant floor heat in here just as a backup i haven't really thought it through about the radiant floor heat yet but we're just putting the pecs in and then figuring out later you know i heard it was smart to do it so so we were like driving around looking for land just talking about it looking for land and then we saw this old faded sign off in the desert over here [Music] we started building you know that was the big thing we like got the dozer we bought the land that was huge like dude the day we got one wrapped around this roof was like it went from just sticks to like wow here we go you didn't just come here to buy land to build a house you came here to have an education totally and i've learned so much so much like yeah i probably learned more in this three years and i've learned maybe in like any three years of just any takeaway lessons like good nuggets yeah just tons and tons just experience i feel like almost everything you do is based on experience and like you have to wear so many hats when you're building your own home like you can go from being a framer to an electrician and like you know drop of a hat i installed those myself i had a buddy who like told me how to hook it all up he would just come over every day and be like now hook these up and then leave come back over and be like now hook that up you know he kind of just held my hand through it um but yeah i did a lot i did this install pretty much with help that was fun learned learned a lot you know matt and goldie took a leap of faith and it seemed like the universe had aligned to help them at every turn every story he told me was filled with unbelievable bargains and friends who went the extra mile to help them out they always seemed to be in the right place at the right time a lot of this is recycled material so we were just throwing it together and trying to get in as fast as possible did you did you use some uh like reclaimed windows those small reclaimed windows that you bought from oh we didn't buy any custom glazing i built that around our windows we got for like free whoa you got all this glazing for free dude we set the post to the window we got the windows first you got all this glazing for free [Music] you see those white ones up top yeah the big long light ones 20 bucks or 10 bucks a pop and then we bought the two operables but like the all this stuff is like salvaged from craigslist and then like like one time i got nine windows i had to help the dude i wanted to help the dude dismantle the windows out of out of the you know their frames and then i gave him 50 bucks for the windows and helped him pull him out and he gave me three solar panels two batteries all the wiring for the batteries three hydro solar panels and just let me store all this on his pla on his house give me a bunch of flashing like whoa i gave him 50 bucks he gave me like all these things that i'm like using you know like [Music] we did metal ceilings we over ordered by accident on some ceilings we had a really good deal on craigslist on some pro panel what about this wall here which wool this one oh this wall so this is um they sell like these like they're like d cuts or they call them like firewood slabs and they're pretty much just like i'll show you what one looks like real quick they come looking like this you know in a big on a big pallet and they're like 75 bucks and you get like a ton of these like a one pound was way more enough to do both those sides and so i just you know sanded them down put a little water sealant on and then uh filled the cracks with the earthen like an earthen plaster there's a little bit of like wheat paste in it um and just sifted it out real well you know and what's that technique that was just they call it shanking i'm pretty sure but that i just did my own version we just had some earthen plaster lying around and it's like you know it's just like sifted earthen plaster that we bought um and pre-made in a tote and then we just sifted it out and added a little wheat paste and that's what that is and you know this is a really awesome community like you know i don't know everyone in it but the you know the portion of people that i don't hang out with i love them you know we're like we're family our buddy helped us plaster it he does pools and he came down for um you know like three days and helped us you know do this like texture on there that plaster he helped us set all these he brought the rock down this dude totally like hooked us up like a really good friend of ours which is like the story with a lot of this stuff like our friends really like pulled through on like for this house like there's just so many friend hours in this house you know you put a nail through your finger yesterday helping us out so you know that's yeah hours and hours of like like that check the mic and make sure it sound right boys yo check it out that's what it looks like that looks great so it's got a little in and a little out the hole perfect yeah i know it was interesting to have the nail go through and out and then for me to know that it went through and out and then also have to pull off of it oh yeah and then come down but yeah anyways that's thanks for that man that's that's really the brotherhood yeah work trades [Music] that's the earthship style cooling tube uh you know the wind will blow from the north and run under uh the cool ground and so that'll cool the wind off blowing through and cool our house and so we have cooling tubes down here and then operable windows up in the corner over there and like this is all an experiment i'm just hoping that's going to be enough airflow for this house you know like i put these in here because i was kind of in a pinch and they're just fixed windows but maybe we'll have to come in and throw some operables later in the winter yeah so the idea is in the wintertime on december 21st i think the sun um comes back here about seven feet is where we get it um so that'll heat this whole floor and like like you can feel it in the shoulder seasons right now how like much how warm this room gets you know like this room here i have these open all day like and pretty much all night and it's you know it gets chilly at night if those are over but if you shut those it's pretty consistent in here and it'll heat up in the day um and then yeah like i've come in here in the winter i've slept in here a bunch it's like you know like 10 below zero and stuff and just ran the wood stove and that was with and that was with no glass here so we're just we don't even know [Music] wow just look i like sometimes i drive by it multiple times just to like stare at it you know because i'm like wow it's really big and we we did that it's kind of weird it's kind of crazy you know that we did that so yeah the work's behind us it's a good feeling yeah we did some this is what you get when you um you know when you diy stuff you learn the hard way but you get through it yeah this is a beautiful job that you did on the the flashing here it's actually a really really clean example of how you can finish off a front face and uh make it look good i mean it's it's not easy i went a little crazy with that brown caulking um goldie did the color color arrangement and i just kind of like did the idea for like you know we just ordered this from the local roofing company um yeah they were just channels i just gave them dimensions and they just bent them and cut them and we got to pick our color out so this is covering up those two um you know sister two by fours and then the cedar on the outside we stain the cedar with like eco wood or something like that and these are covering the posts i mean they got a little wavy but whatever you know yo let's take a look at the roof if you don't go up on the roof it took a lot of construction it's just like common sense you know overlapped you're like okay you do this you do that you just gotta backtrack and you do mock it up you know figure it out you know builders know that do a little mock-up that's a massive roof man there's a lot of metal up here so when you had leftover metal you put it on the inside ceiling we just we you know we miscounted we had a miscount and we had a bunch left over and so we just we had the materials a lot of it is like you see all the crap lying around i'm constantly trying to like use these materials that we picked up so and then you know recycling materials you wind up putting a lot um of labor into the recipe like yeah tires are free but how long does it take to pack a tire or like those d logs over there were 75 bucks but it took me forever to like prep them to put them up on the wall and you know and then like you know i feel like we just got lucky with the the roofing [Music] [Music] you were like a student yes you came in knowing nothing yeah there's so many things here that i have never done before and you know yeah a lot of stuff you're looking at i hadn't done before and anyone can do it yeah yeah that's the point yeah definitely yeah i just needed to flip the perspective at the end there for everybody who's watching so that do you understand that you can just do it it's rewarding do it you have to work to get there it's a lot of work to get there and to learn yeah learn it do the work but you know what you have fun so much fun and you aren't so much fun yeah just la dude just being on the job site with good people is like an amazing experience and i feel like that's what really motivated goldie uh with earth like that's where like that i feel like that's what did for her what she took away from that was just like she had this companionship and when you're on the job site and you're in crappy conditions it's like and you're sharing this moment like you can either be with someone who's going to be like wow this sucks and keeps saying it sucks or you could be the dude that's sitting there like laughing like this you know whatever man like let's laugh about what can you do you know let's get this done and then when you turn around the other day with construction at least it's like whoa we did that yeah you know you're so involved in it and you're not really stepping back and looking and when you like you forget and you step back and look you're like yes yes like this is it it's worth it yep it's all worth it matt also had a youtube channel and hosts a podcast with yet another urship owner builder named pete pete also happened to be building an earthship down the road seriously i'm not making this stuff up and so after discovering that there was another youtuber in crestone i got my gear ready picked up the phone gave him a call and asked him politely for an interview and here's the home tour for you here we are coming at you creston colorado this is matt and pete meet pete and his dog isabella they live in a 900 square foot totally off-grid earthship studio in crestone colorado it's going to be highlighting a lot of videos and how-to videos of processes that we've gone through in the past just really trying to help people out and have owner builders and empower owner builders to kind of do their thing with a bachelor's degree in music technology and audio recording pete has been working hard to build a home studio the inspiration first came in his last year of college when he started to make passive income by selling the rights to a video he posted that went viral after it got 11 million views all these tv shows started to call it was on tosh.0 oh jimmy campbell it was on he was on touch it was on taj it was on mtv rob dyrdek ridiculousness all these whoa places and it was usually like 500 for them to license like the 30 second clip to it the royalties helped him afford his last year of college but the checks eventually stopped however it did get him thinking about passive income which led him to the idea of passive housing i was working at a place called sweetwater sound in fort wayne indiana for three years after college and i didn't like indiana i was you know kind of wanting to change it up from working in an office and talking on the phone all day and discovered earthships and discovered that my aunt and uncle were living in towson new mexico 10 minutes away from all the stuff that was going down so i was like hey saved up some money i wanted to find a place with no building codes and that's kind of one of the things our ship talks about are pockets of freedom found creststone and found my friend thomas and deborah who were also building an earthship have a community of people that can be helpful is very big time i feel like that's half the reason why earthship does so well in the past you know 30 years is because they always have people that get inspired by what mike reynolds is trying to do and come volunteer or help out or do something similar and it's like it's a team yeah you know it's like if i just went uh hey i'm gonna go buy 40 acres in the middle of the county and i'm an hour away from my friends or whatever like that hey i'm gonna go move in the woods somewhere and it's like there's not uh like-minded people that are right down the road that are doing the same thing it's tough [Music] and like i'm a perfect example that's about never done it before went to earship for a month got inspired and came out here three four years later and i'm in a house no rent no electricity bill no water bill yeah you know i pay a hundred dollars a year on county taxes still you know so it's like sure i live in a property owner association where i have to pay 400 bucks a year kind of sucks but check the mic and make sure it sounds right i've never done it before so i'm totally green to all this stuff and i've done a fair amount in three years but it sounds like in three years you've learned a heck of a lot about what it's like to build in the so-called pocket of freedom that is and i think that's what people that are how would you say like that have blind ambition or letter like trusteefarians are like oh yeah i'm just going to build an earthship like i think a lot of people have a lot of hope and like a lot of stuff is you know again blind ambition they want you know it sounds good and it sounds like a great deal but it is a lot of work you have to like just like anything you have to put a lot of work into something if you want it it is a pocket of freedom and and what i mean by that is literally if you tried to do this in any other county that had whatever they call ubc's universal building codes you wouldn't be able to do it you know period end of story so like even though you might have to still pull some state electrical permits maybe a state plumbing permit septic permit through the county you still can do it [Music] that thing that you can find people that are doing like-minded thing whether it's earthship type of folks or whether it's just people that are into like off-grid building like i've met so many people that are building cool straw bale houses cool uh you know rammed earth houses cool you know ferro cement hot like all these different korea bag houses like all these different types of building because there's no building codes makes people that are like do-it-yourselfers you know people that are like hey because of no building codes i'm going to go build my house easier than it would be if i build a house in denver [Music] we just interviewed tom matt and pete three builders whose homes are inspired by earthship biotectures self-sufficient design principles all three chose a similar passive solar design using the same recycled building techniques such as rammed earth tire walls and recycled glass bottle bricks however in this video we are going to take a look at a wacky home that uses a variety of other building techniques tom helped build this house and wanted to give my father and i a look inside from a distance the home looked rather strange but the closer we got the more interesting it became that's it now see i've never seen an earth berm done this way because it's he's got these he retains his own stone towers yeah he retains and then then he's got the retaining wall and you can really get away with that here because the climb is so dry the wood works perfectly yeah piles on top of the looping material and then there's a bunch of layers of foam underneath that yeah [Music] that's a really cool brick wall yeah so he basically built the earth bag here but it's not earthbag it's got scaria in the bags instead of dirt so it's basically did you get in the van the lava rock you know you've seen marco use the red yeah yeah yeah and then he added this on this is all masonry masonry block here and then he did this uh these are i don't know where he salvaged these from but that's somewhat of somewhat of a trauma um i love the way they did this window yeah he's got another one in the shed same way yeah recycled brick on the floor i'm not sure what the plaster is [Music] what's below the uh brick um sand i think you might have some gravel in there and then uh probably rigid insulation so the floors are insulated these are uh this is pavers the floors pavers and um sawed off uh four by four by twelve you can see these are like little thin layers of oh yeah so it alternated the floor pattern there um so it's one of the most that's centrifugal uh forget what you call that type of uh roof right there reciprocal roof that's pretty trick the way they overlap and so yeah they all tie in that's still yeah um so that was an addition there's the uh addition here he had a rocket stove in the floor right here rocket show gravity fed you know in the top and it vents out through the bench right here the vent goes up through this bench out through that bench and then it went out of the house but because he was selling it he the bank wouldn't uh you know give someone a loan with that type of uh heating uh heat source and then just uh another little room here with a whopping three bedrooms the house is now listed on airbnb tom shared with us his insider knowledge and the fact that the building had been created in phases and with every new organic addition another interesting quirk he was walled off for a little bit you know he hadn't had didn't have this finish so this was here but there were bags here then he then he did the addition and then he knocked out the wall so the earth's back um this is a cattle panel i think this is a cattle panel vault so basically just takes those big cattle panels big big wire grid basically they come in big big long sections wire tie them together and then make your arch and then laugh diamond lath on that you know sort of her ship style kind of a vault [Music] oh he buried all the [Music] yeah he used to be able to see the earth bags in here but um he pretty much buried them all you can see a couple back he met his girlfriend they end up getting married and they wanted more room you know so that's where they used to sleep up there [Music] [Music] they used to have a europe dome on it but it was like way too bright yeah so he took the ur the clear dome off the center there and and replaced it with that sauna that uh solar tube there that sonic tube or whatever that's called [Music] wow huh interesting [Music] you can play that backwards it'll look like i'm going up [Music] [Music] my father and i hit the ground running filming four home tours in the first week it was a lot of work and after my father injured his back we decided to get some rest and relaxation at a local hot springs in the nearby town now this wasn't originally planned to be part of the documentary but when we got there we met an unexpected surprise and i don't know about you but i love some geodesic dome greenhouses the valley view hot springs in moffitt colorado is an oasis in the desert a sacred site with a deeply peaceful atmosphere new coven restrictions meant that there were less people in the spa and we had to book our spot ahead of time as we entered the spa it felt like being transported to another realm [Music] [Music] a dreamy place where sacred geometry lined the walls where three pools got gradually warmer and all had the same breathtaking view [Music] [Music] for my father it was simply relief from his nagging back pain but for me it was a realm of wonder and beauty as i left my father behind and went exploring [Music] first i found teepees which stood tall and mighty against the horizon this happens to be the location where i filmed the last clip of my channel intro i walked the meditation labyrinth and met the angel at the center whose mask was making a silent statement about the worldwide pandemic [Music] exiting the labyrinth i saw several small yurts and a geodesic tiny house which they rent out to overnight guests and that's when i saw her standing there beautifully in the sunlight her pentagonal geometry calling me closer a geodesic dome greenhouse like this one is a dream for most off-grid homesteaders and even though i've studied how to build them and seen many pictures i've never stepped foot in one [Music] going inside was like teleporting from the dry desert to the rainforest i was greeted with the sound of running water the smell of flowers and lush green plants surrounding me [Music] i returned to the sound of our tibetan bowl as my father played it beside him in the water while he meditated [Music] a sound that you might recognize from the intro of all my videos instruments like this are great for reducing stress and anxiety and can help with sleep problems when used right before he bed the attention of some of the guests who were eager to experience the magic for themselves [Music] [Music] we made some new friends and our time at the hot springs was up that's when my father and i got the opportunity to meet nikki and zuki a musician and a midwife who started their off the grid homestead 20 years ago and what they've created in that time is inspirational they have six buildings including an earthship studio and an earthship inspired underground greenhouse and they welcomed us into their home for a tour which i'm very excited to share with all of you welcome this is our home and we're uh nick and zuki hamzuki this is nick [Laughter] more brown part and i just enjoy nature and i had always wanted as a teenager even started thinking about in the future what i wanted to do and where i wanted to live i wasn't too sure for many years but i landed here in colorado in 1997 and fell in love with the beauty and the mountains and this community which i had no idea at the time was actually one of the few communities i think in the united states that basically embraced any kind of building in this county where you could build with anything you wanted as long as i guess electric and plumbing were to code for the state but in the county itself you could build out of cans bottles straw uh tires paper crates sandbags anything you wanted um pumice creek and i didn't even know that but so i landed in the right place and when i figured it out um yep great i said that with the freedom to build anything nikki and zuki let their imagination run wild drawing inspiration from the canon bottle walls that make earthship houses so aesthetically appealing it's one of the first bottle walls we did yeah we messed up quite a bit with you know trying to fit wood you're supposed to put nails very pi what do they call it a porcupine and i didn't do that but on newer ones we did i forgot about that yeah but it's all right around every corner and everywhere you looked was another bottle wall wow yeah these were all everything we've been doing with bottles so far has been with the help also of the woofers we have for six months out of the year so all these planters here were done this year with our whippers in the front here um these were done a different year with some other woofers very photogenic kitty huh you're very photogenic and i love the bottles for planters because you don't have to cut them so you just put whole bottles in and they're really beautiful because you see the other bottles so in these we did use plastic and up there there's some nice up ones up there these were some of our very first we filled them with sand yeah because they were kind of cheap plastic so we did put sand in these because they'll collapse with the weight of the mortar and then i took some old pottery and stuck it in there you know i felt like i broke something that week i think we're making this a pot these are probably the only ones that have plastic yeah yeah i don't know if i like the thin plastic the hard the harder like the soda bottle plastic that looks like a flower on the bottom i like that that works out good they even had a bottle wall chicken coop [Music] yeah i love it i love creating i love designing and this was always a cooperative so my clients i'm a midwife and my clients actually for the first 15 years i was here traded services to me for caring for them so even all the straw bales in this house and in the cottage were all donated by a client then i had another client built the kitchen and another guy might come and do some you know bookshelves for me i mean it was just such a cooperative so that's why i call it creative birth choices because it's creative we make it creative and fun a lot of my clients have done art murals and pretty little like art things on the fireplace and in the bathroom and and so i want to continue that because i think the exchange is is just a nicer way than not just money you know i like trading the main house is the heart of the homestead where meals are made and bathrooms are located zuki has two large bathtubs dedicated to performing water births for her clients [Music] the living room is earthy and grounding [Music] like being in a giant womb [Music] and at the center of it all stands a monument to the sacred mother the giver of life the community was very few and i moved here maybe two 300 people year round um and then i met nick in 2009 and he moved down here in 2011 and started helping me build and i had this main house built already i had a straw bale home and a little straw bale cottage um other than that everything else we've done together since nikki moved in they have been very busy building four new structures on the property including an adorable tiny dome home a portable tiny home and two earthship inspired structures made using rammed earth tire bricks the first is an earthship studio and the other is a wallampini style underground greenhouse i was lucky enough to get a guided tour on two separate occasions once during the interview and again at nikki's birthday party so if you're wondering why he has a cowboy hat and a beer in some scenes and not others now you know why so this is an earthship hybrid it's not a traditional earthship by any means this is our first attempt and i'll show you this after but that's entirely an earthship greenhouse so on this earth ship there's no greenhouse aspect it's entirely a greenhouse that's entirely nice greenhouse and this is just going to be i call it ownership master suite it's a detached greenhouse with a detached greenhouse yeah so all these planters are made out of pallet wood and scrap uh from the building material got these bricks used at a yard sale for my dad um dude let's see inside let's see inside the crib welcome to cribs yeah wow oh wow so this is all pallet wood over here uh as a faux wall uh zucchi didn't care for the mortar look and she wanted to be able to hang pictures and and way more utilitarian you know it's the whole thing's a nailer right so you know we still got all the pallets for free pretty much and there's tires up to here as well we were running out of daylight and we had to cut the tour short but nikki was generous enough to give me another tour the next day check the mic and make sure it sound right boy leave it open because it's kind of dark this is so much better though wow yeah i couldn't wait to get back in here and actually have a little bit of light because i love all the woodwork you guys really and especially the joinery that you use at the top here of the poston beam right yeah and that was done because um we had a dilemma that we really should have done this first so we did after the roof was up and we had to we actually had to raise the roof yeah we had to kind of jack up the roof a bit to fit the post yeah so that was the only way to slide it and like up instead of under and they're only thirty dollars yeah he he's amazing and he's so [Music] like so all the posts you see were thirty dollars each and they were like super even taller than this yeah we gotta cut them that guy is just amazing and they go deep they go you know down as well recycle pallets too because it's beautiful wood [Music] according to their calculations it only cost them about ten to fifteen thousand dollars to make which they attribute mostly to the cost of lumber cement and a little bit of labor and the kitchen dining area so solar and the one gravity water system is is all that the house has we didn't do a greenhouse in here because we have a nurse ship greenhouse just right next door right the whole greenhouse just for that yeah so so along the front wall we decided to do shelving and uh you know bookcases and stuff like that and it's pretty cool yeah this is you know it's not a traditional ship it's a hybrid just under a thousand watt system um four panels 250 watt panels um but i got the 2000 uh watt inverter because it had the hard wire so i could hardwire it to my breaker which i wired the house as well with some dc disconnects and then solar panels on the roof the idea for the battery oh that's cool i've never seen like that four six volt batteries to make a 24 volt system and i just drilled some holes in the back for some ventilation on it it's not like an eyesore because it's such a close close i could put a blanket on there or whatever and don't forget nick to mention you were a novice before this so anybody could probably learn how to set up their own solar system if they're inclined to i was not so i let him do it but um i would just go buy candles if it were up to me [Music] so i just hooked up the gas line again first gas line leaked but i got this one it's a water tank for rain catchment going into our uh kitchen sink this is the pad where the outhouse is gonna be which we're gonna be building here in the next week or so but we gotta get rid of the stump first how long did it take you to build it four years and it's mainly me my step son zach zuki and then uh woofers like i said maybe a carpenter or two along the way uh but mainly it's just been a family project all money out of pocket and uh so it's been a slow go but it's been good four years and not every day you know the winners here are very cold so uh a lot of snow so it's really only been maybe you know eight nine months out of the year that we can build [Music] it's amazing what nikki and zuki have created here it feels like i'm standing in a real life example of a place that i've dreamed of building during my years studying off-grid homesteading and now the moment you've all been waiting for it's finally time to take a look inside their underground greenhouse [Music] we decided just to make it a greenhouse yeah they did this a couple years ago did this when we moved here and this one um well we both actually we dug down wow this one we dug down a little bit further than the other one but the other one we actually dug out four feet down as well oh so it didn't feel like it was we walked in on ground level but it was actually four feet down from looks like the violence the real ground level garden this is this is four feet down this is four feet how much food do you guys get out of here we get a lot of greens we mainly grow greens here and some herbs tomatoes uh kales and chards peppers but yeah we can definitely eat more out of here uh in the later months you know we still have food growing in the main garden behind the house too we've been harvesting because it's october but we eat out of the garden almost year round it's probably just those few months like i said where it gets super cold to where we don't even want to come out and light that wood stove because it's just too much and when did you build this this was probably was built right before the earthship so five six years ago and how long did it take to build uh it only took uh one year well maybe a year and a half because we built the main structure with the tires and cans and then um framing the the top part and the roof took about another half year mainly because of weather the the cost on this if the other one was what you said maybe maybe ten thousand dollars this how much could you this one yeah hardly anything at all maybe you know maybe three at the most and that's with uh just lumber cement and labor where we live we don't get a whole lot of rain uh we do get some uh more in the summertime um but we've been kind of in a drought we just fill up with the hose basically right now but when we do get a rain i mean they're overflowing you know all of our rain catchment girls you know and we have a big like thousand gallon right out here for you know the emergency if we need it nikki had been very generous with his time and family duties were calling the end of this tour brings us closer to the end of the story of our time here in crestone but there's one last thing that i am really really excited to show you i don't know exactly how to describe it but somehow there exists a home that is so bizarre so sculptural that it'll only make sense if i show you for those of you who've been following my story i've been building up to this video since the launch of the channel that's because this is the most mind-blowing home tour i've released so far jeff and ruth lived in a small adobe house right next to the ongoing experimental art installation that they've been building for the last 12 years tom lives next door and has been a part of the ongoing construction project this building is certainly one of a kind not only was it sculptural but it was also experimental on the south side of the building they installed large panes of glass which weren't exactly windows they were there to try and heat up the walls on the south side of this concrete brick and steel rebar structure which struggled to stay warm during the harsh winters unlike the other passive solar houses that we've been looking at capturing the sun's energy for heating was an afterthought rather than a design feature however there were some small windows which gave a glimpse to the mystical world within and while the building might have struggled to use the sun's energy it certainly made up for it in other ways including an elaborate sculptural gutter system that funneled water off the roof into outdoor planter cells where they could have a small herb garden the design and construction was led by steve corner and his company flying concrete his style influenced by the work of gowdy and it really shows as you walk the outside of the building [Music] and every window and every door are made custom by local artisans the frames need to be welded together to fit the structure that they have made and while the outside of the building might seem a bit random there's actually a deep wisdom behind its design the back side of the building provides a glimpse into how the structure was made using a series of bent steel rebar which is later covered in cement the design of the structure utilizes the strength of an arch [Music] so while the outside of the building might seem random the arches seen on the facade actually reflect the inside structure which gives it strength so all of the features that jump off the side of the building actually act as supports to prevent the building from collapsing on itself and even though i knew about some of these design features from the outside i wasn't prepared for what we were about to see because the truth is that the inside of the structure is like entering into another realm [Music] the tour began in jeff's studio which was a massive room with a center pillar that bore the weight of all of the intersecting arches above it the design allowed for a large dome shape that wasn't too tall and could support the weight of a second story above it but it also just gave the room an incredible mystical feeling [Music] that's when i learned that jeff was a sculptor living in a sculpture as a sculptor myself i felt like i had something in common with jeff and couldn't help but daydream of having a studio like this one day [Music] okay dad we're gonna mosey into the next room [Music] yeah bruce we followed jeff deeper into his world and for a moment i'd just like to share with you how that felt um [Music] jeff's master suite was the crowning gem of this incredible mind-blowing otherworldly undescribable experience it wasn't until i looked into the bathroom of the master suite that i realized that this wasn't the end of the tour and that outside the windows lied the next realm because the roof was the final destination right here the two-car garage it looks like just one from this view it was as though we were standing on our own mountain with a stone staircase that seemed to emerge out of the ground and crawl its way up to us on the second story of this gigantic stone castle the structure was solid and stable like a giant rock forming a landscape of its own that we could walk on play and explore standing there with my father and tom i felt inspired and grateful for our time in crestone i realized that we had reached the climax of our adventure which began when we reunited with our old friend and evolved into meeting new friends along the way [Music] i kept the camera rolling hoping to capture stories capable of inspiring the world and even though our time in crestone was over i felt like my dream had just come true [Music] after my summer in america i traveled to sweden to check out some really cool off-grid structures and communities and even though those videos haven't been released yet i did film a couple fun travel vlogs while i was there check them out okay what's up everybody eric here and i am coming to you from the swedish field with a video blog uh impromptu we're going to a waffle cottage that i have no idea how they get their supplies there i guess a snow scooter comes and brings it in but um either way will they have running water is there gonna be a bathroom uh it seems like a pretty off-grid place to me i can't look directly at the camera because it's so bright right now so i'm just gonna be squinting like this the whole time but anyways i'm gonna see if i can get my questions answered about this uh off-the-grid waffle cottage [Music] all right here we are on the fjell which is a swedish word for uh rolling uh high altitude landscape we've heard that there's a cafe that's gonna serve some waffles at the end of the road here and i'm concerned how they get electricity and water and other systems so we're gonna go and check it out oh i gotta go is there a bathroom so they have running water what if they're out of what if they're out of milk what if they're out of milk is there wi-fi it's incredible foreign [Music] so there are solar panels and they run lights for in the sleeping area and in here but we run off a diesel generator usually all right so right now you're running off a diesel generator yeah we are the waffle lines take a little too much juice for solar panels uh so we bring all of our own water up every morning and we source that from tucson at roman beriad but in the summer time there's a pump in the lake so they bring water over so it's not running in the winter but it does in the summer if they wanted it to yeah john [Music] foreign in sweden in the north and we have a little bit of sunlight left before we uh plunge into this freezing cold water to celebrate our friend's birthday so this is going to be interesting oh this stupid ball is coming in you're gonna get baptized we're gonna get baptized in ice [Music] hey december finnish dollar repping kung's barrier you want to go inside okay how do you feel i feel excited i feel very uh stoked on this a bit scared to be honest reality is starting to hit me all right you've done it once before yeah one time but uh i was screaming top of my lungs really yeah i panicked like here i was the first one in never saw anyone do that so i just jumped in and i my lungs empty over there and i couldn't like do anything except for get up what are you gonna do this time to change it um i'm gonna watch david and try to like maintain my breathing deep breaths just trying to focus and um yeah thank you for where it is nice you think you're gonna do better this time i hope so do you want to i do awesome i do how about you i have done it once before in a pond and i think i did pretty it was deep it was deep we went down to our shoulders and i think i did pretty okay we had partied already this is the first sober time i think i think it's gonna be a good experience wow [Music] yes let's celebrate winter time what's your goal one minute [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] oh [Music] how was it i don't know yet swim all gonna get wet tonight i'm american what's your goal dude my goal you did one minute one minute my goal is two minutes oh oh [Music] foreign [Music] how does it feel good um [Music] [Music] [Music] oh there you go roll it yep great [Laughter] he's going inside in the best sunset we've ever seen here today all right okay let's do this [Music] [Music] mother nature gave you this body and you are strong [Music] you can do this [Music] you're doing excellent you've done it once before yeah one time but uh i was screaming top of my lungs really yeah i panicked i was the first one in never saw anyone do that so i just jumped in and then i my lungs emptied over there and i couldn't like do anything except for get up what are you gonna do this time to change it um i'm gonna watch david and try to like maintain my breathing deep breaths just trying to focus and uh yeah thank you for where it is nice you think you're gonna do better this time i hope so do you want to i do okay okay thank you for watching [Music] [Music] hey everybody i'm filming this update from the skipple airport in amsterdam i'm headed back to america i've been working behind the scenes on something super exciting i'm going to be building an earthship and documenting the entire process from dirt to doorknob it's a tiny super efficient air ship so it's an earth ship tiny house that's it for me i have to go catch my flight all right i arrived in taos and today was the first day on the build site monumental occasion we pounded the first course of tires which is always a feather in the cap to be a part of the foundation of the building very satisfying hard work hot sun but we even had a little bit of rain during the middle of the day and some clouds that came and gave us some shade not too bad but i tell you i'm going to be sleeping good tonight part of the process today that's so tedious and what makes the first day of tire pounding so laborious is that you really need to take the time to make the foundation perfect you want the building to be square you want all your tires to be sitting exactly where they're going to be because they're 300 pounds once they're pounded and you don't want to move them after that i have an idea of the site you know we've got a trailer with all our tools in it and some solar panels on top and we're going to be able to run some power tools with that it's awesome you don't always get that on a work site so we're looking really good and then we have a shade area that they've created over here they've built a awning and they're going to be putting some shade tarps over that so that we have a shady area to work in during these hot days in the full sun ron has the cooling tubes that just got welded at the shop sitting here in his trailer ready for installation when it's time and today the main objective was to pound the north face tire wall because the back of the building is going to be receiving the cooling tubes which are going to come under the ground they're going to pop up out of the ground and then they're going to be sitting on that first row of tires so the objective for today was to get those tires set level pounded that way we can install the cooling tubes next so there's a lot of steps some of these steps already took place before i got here and i was able to pick ron's brain he left the black water and the leech field cells open and the septic tank exposed so that i could see that um in order to document that part of the build which was awesome you know it feels uh like everything fell into place so that i could be here at this moment and i'm really excited and ready to produce some high quality content for everybody okay everybody it's day two on the job site and we're getting rained out so we're covering up the tires a little bit of moisture in the dirt would have been nice but getting this much rain in the tires at this point wouldn't be great because it would be like mud taking off for the day day two in the books prius camper on site off-grid guru out okay so behind me is the construction site for an earthship tiny house that is underway i've been posting updates and i wanted to show everyone what this house will look like when it's completed we've been trying to get in touch with the owner of the tiny house that ron built and sold already which is right behind the camera person here and so we're about to take a walk through essentially what this building is going to look like once it is completely finished let's go check this out so it's really not that far away in fact it's within uh within eyesight of the other build here all right come on [Music] in so as you can see there's a lot more color on this building than it makes out right now while it's under construction the whole front face is going to be plastered and then tinted with a green stain some of the details on the front face like the mullion caps that go over the windows are clearly visible now which are the metal caps that are screwed down onto the windows here the green flashing on the top and some exterior lamps and electrical details as well as most differently uh that you don't see on the build right now is these uh planter cells that are in the front of the building now we're going to catch up with ron and the crew who had already gone inside ron is going to talk about some of the details in this house that are going to be the same and also changes that we're going to make for the future we started the tour in the greenhouse so what you have right now is you got a banana tree you've got rubber tree you got purple jew there's geranium in here you always want to put geranium inside of your planter it's a it's a good companion plant but it's also a bug repellent you can get aphids and mites and some heavy predators and come in here and decimate a planter pretty easily especially with not having a full-time homeowner here to manage the system so this space even though it was like probably high 20s this morning this space is going to be pushing about 90 all day long it's almost uncomfortably warm it is it can get to about 140 degrees uh if those blinds were all the way open this little eight foot space would be on fire you can see that the plants are struggling a lot of them are already really dry and struggling from the direct heat from the sun so again it needs a lot of water it's probably very thirsty and who knows what greywater is even available to these plants at this point i would start top watering them uh pretty quickly if they want them to last through the winter which is the time where they get beat up the most the crew is here to study the design that they would end up building themselves so we took a look inside at the living space [Music] the house uh is going to be the same in terms of like the way the pitch of the ceiling is all your cabinets rather than be homemade and my crew is going to have the same kitchen layout uh they do want a larger refrigerator they're gonna do something different down here we're not gonna put a bar we are gonna have the cool spice rack which is really slick i'm a big fan of uh storage and kitchens i've been in the restaurant business since i was seven years old so i really know how to build kitchens this kitchen was actually designed to be even slicker i had built a bar and it was on casters and it had dowel plugs and you could make it level right here with two bar stools and then it was designed to spin to basically right here for an additional food prep area and then it clicked down again and it slipped back here to the blanco so you could you could eat here and the murphy bed i designed had a built-in couch and drawers it was a one of a kind both of these were one of a kind we made them custom here on site but the new owner i sold it to they they didn't want any use of it so we'll put them in the new building there'll be way more space also with the new building this is only 12 feet the new one's 14 feet and the greenhouse is actually going to be a little bit bigger as well so you get a little bit more food production that's going to happen in it that's going to be in the closet now right because i didn't screw it up and make my closet too small so these breaker panels right here these are your dc panels this is your ac panel basically if there's a problem with them and they spark you've got to have 36 inches space of clearance to move away from it we had 32 so as a result we were going to fail the electrical inspection uh and i can't risk that so we ended up deciding at the last minute okay we're going to put it here we'll leave that as a closet for cleaning supplies because again it was an airbnb it was a perfect fit it ended up working and then we put the agm batteries underneath so in the end there have been many changes made to the new design which we're currently working on one of the big changes was an increase in the size of the floor plan in the bathroom while the old design only accounted for a small shower cabin the new design allows for an entire tub [Music] [Music] well that's it for the tour i hope it gave you a better idea of what we're building and what it's going to look like when it's finished as for us we're going back to work behind me i've got a construction site that we've been working hard on all week it's been on my bucket list to build on one of these job sites professionally and i am here now today doing that anyways for the next three months i'm going to be posting updates this is week one for you nice hot summer day smoke coming down into the taos valley the last several days so i'm a little hoarse a little scratchy okay so today my number one focus is layout so we want to get the interior dimensions of the square footage of the home based on the architectural plans what we're really focused on is this right here today um we want to make sure that these 490s are accurate so when we bring our tires all the way down the back wall we're also going to establish what they call a three tire turn right here because tires around and these corners are curved we're gonna place a tire right on top of this stake so we're gonna go right through the crosshairs right down through the center of the tire we want our interior measurement based on course one or also known as base course then we're gonna start coming up as we batter back so the room will feel bigger as we go up as we pound all the tires we're gonna pound the tire level to itself and level to each other on either side so we want to pound 38 tires we're going with the bigger tires pretty much all of them then we're going to go to smaller tires but after all this brain work is out of the way it goes quick it's just now muscle work [Music] all right so it's day six on the job i'm really tired sometimes it can feel like the build goes really slow just because of the technique we're using you know rammed earth and old used car tires it's not for everybody even though tires might not be the most effective way to build you can streamline them once you get the hang of it and the more experience that you get in any building medium the more effective it becomes and the more quick it goes up you know you understand how to use the material the limits of the material you know one of the things that i've been noticing about tire pounding and one of the things that we've been doing is um minimizing on the amount of uh using the sledgehammer you know in the beginning it seems like okay let's just sledgehammer the whole way and then after a while you get smart and you're like okay let me first use my hands to pack it as much as i can and then i developed this really effective technique of just going around and using the pickaxe to get leverage so that i could push dirt under the sidewalls and you can pretty much puff up the tire to a pretty good firmness before you even need to use the sledgehammer and then i mean i'm talking like 90 you know 90 of packing out the tire is just shoveling the dirt in kicking it in you know using some minimal force maybe a small hammer but i didn't even use a small hammer i just used my feet kicked it in use the pickaxe to get the sidewall up and then just in the end when you want to level it to the tire next to it you're going to get that sledge hammer to give it a little bit of pop so that it comes up that extra quarter inch or half inch you need anyways we'll see how it goes maybe i'll be complaining after another week of tire pounding [Music] you know we got two cooling tubes in which is going to be the ventilation for the building so those trenches were dug and the cooling tubes were put in [Music] papa the cooling tubes are fully buried at this point so you can't even see them you just have the opening here and the opening over there found some cool animals while we were working out here there was like a small frog that was really weird i didn't expect it because it's such a desert and then also this really big mole cricket came by and said hello and those things are huge if you haven't seen them google mole cricket they're so big so week three we have almost the fifth course of tires done we'll probably have that done tomorrow not bad all right so today we're talking thermal wrap on the earth ship um basically i wanted to show you the process that can make it easier to understand how to wrap your earship and insulation this is the part this is the the single part that people mess up consistently uh when they try to diy their own house and they just don't understand why you need to do the thermal wrap in this particular very meticulous way with no leaks and no gaps so that you have the maximum efficiency of thermal battery in your house so that's a lot of gobbledygook you probably didn't understand what i meant right there but i'm going to turn the camera over take a look at the wall and explain it and then it'll all make sense so basically in the earthship you want to keep the heat inside the building and so you're burying panes of insulation in the ground which are getting wrapped double ply and is it 10 mil i forget the insulation is the plastic is quite thick uh is this eight mil ron what's the plastics mill okay so we got six mil doubled and then wrapped over this uh sheet of expanded polystyrene which is basically just foam we're burying it on both sides and usually when you're building an airship with a crew of laborers and you don't have an excavator then what you would do is you'd build up layer by layer and you'd be back filling on either side making sure that this is level as you go up in this event we had an excavator which won't change much what i'm explaining for you but it just does explain for you why we're able to complete this task wrapping the entire building in maybe one day johnny's coming in like a beastie boy we are wrapping it up today no pun intended it's official in the books week three the thermal wrap for the first four feet of the building is up not bad we're gonna be putting some cisterns in tomorrow today is a big day on the job we're going to be trying to finish up the final course of tires making one last push to get that top core set and pounded and then after that we can start working on getting our plates ready so that we can bond the framing to the tires which is a big moment so after the tires and the top course are finished and we put the plate down we're going to be completely finished with the foundation work of the building including pouring the grade beam pouring the bond beam so this week we hope to have all the steel ready for the inspection by the end of the week so this is a pretty big one after this things aren't going to be looking the same behind me i have the tiny plus earthship build i'm coming at you from taos new mexico this is the gravel pit in the greater world earthship community it's the largest airship community in the world and it's where mike reynolds has been experimenting as well as many other owner builders out here on the mesa building off-grid homes radically off-grid homes that capture their own rain water grow their own food contain and treat their own sewage they're heated with a passive thermal mass principles and they're just incredible so we've been working on this project now for we're talking six weeks so we're getting into the month and a half of just pounding tires we are exhausted and cranky and it has been a really difficult run up until this point but we have hit a crucial point in the build where it's going to take a radical turn we've finished the foundational walls we've poured the concrete what ron is now walking into is a structure that can receive essentially all of the carpentry details which are going to enclose the space for the winter for the weather once we get a weather guarded roof up we are going to be dried in so he's going to talk a little bit more about it but the man the myth the legend ron chirillo himself in the flesh his voice is finally back because uh the wildfires came in and the smoke just destroyed his lungs when i first came here he was whispering now this man is screaming and we just got through a week that was really tough had a lot of unexpected twists a lot of manual labor we're exhausted but it's satisfying yes yeah eric's right um stage one and two are brutal especially with a skeleton crew we had to pound about 500 tires out here most days were in the low 90s so yeah as eric mentioned you know that that phase is done thank goodness we are in late september i am expecting the weather start cooling off and start getting our pace picked up which is going to be crucial to get it weathered in stage 2 was concrete and steel so all the footings are done the bond beam footing is signed off by the county grade beam is signed off by the county were prepped for the grounding rod which she would have signed off for me as well but we weren't quite ready uh that'll be signed off on the next inspection so now we're gonna move into phase three it's a shift in the build cost so up until now it's been all going into eric's pocket now i'm just kidding it's labor it's all labor uh tires are free dirt's free cardboard's free you know all that stuff's been free up till now concrete and steel they've still been reasonably priced they really didn't spike during the pandemic like a lot of other things did but now we're in phase three which is all about carpentry so carpentry is going to be plating a lot of plating which we've already gotten into uh concrete stem pour for under the windows so those are lifted off the floor so those are prepped uh then we're gonna start getting into the fun stuff uh i hope it's gonna be fun because up until now not much has been fun we're gonna get into the window boxes door box and then we're going to get into the plating on top of all that so i'm really going to push hard next week to you know get all of that framing going up into the sky coming off to the ground off the ground up to the sky and then we can do our plating and then we're ready to start dropping the roof down on it the timing's really crucial now we're going to be moving into october here next week we could get a snowstorm we could still see 90 degrees it's all over the place i'm going to move all the guys together my entire crew is going to be single-minded tunnel vision focused on weatherproofing this building and hopefully everybody's ready eric and i are pretty tired we're going to be crawling in on on our knees on monday on monday um on monday yeah i mean well we made it through the week and let's take it late let's take a look at what we've done let's you got to see this check it out okay we rolling we're rolling are we we're back in business okay so welcome into my home normally i charge an admission fee but i'm going to let you in for free today since it's a little rough so what you have here is 700 square feet of awesomeness this house is going to like sing is this i'm really excited about this after 16 years of really r and d and every day with her ship is r d uh even after it's done and you're living in it yeah absolutely you're looking at like oh i probably should have not done that we're trying not to have a lot of that but that is going to be the case with every our ship there's only going to be a couple guys on earth that aren't even going to know what those are the people that are buying a house moving into it they're going to notice a thing they're going to love it it's going to love them we're into phase three now so again tires thermal wrap vapor barrier water tanks cooling tubes pack out that's phase one phase two grade beam bond beam signed off from the county all that concrete and steel inspection all completed now we're moving into phase three as eric mentioned this is going to be plating so there's plating right here on the stem wall plating on top of the grade beam plating on top of the concrete little mini stem pores plating on top of the bond beam it's a lot of plating so and that's all pressure treated waterproof because it's sitting directly either on tires or on concrete [Music] [Music] yeah so we're talking about a lot of pores so how many cubic yards of concrete do you think we mixed so i'd say we have about three yards of concrete in our footings quite a bit for a skeleton crew and two mixers by hand uh you know i'm not saying that uh it can't be done i know a lot of guys probably would have ordered a truck the problem with trucks is that they want a minimum yard typically it's about five yards there's a delivery charge uh there's a fuel charge there's a tax charge and by the time it's all said and done here's what i would prefer see this man's pocket i put that money right in there to me that's more important than paying the guys to come out with a big truck so 30 yards is uh cubic yards three cubic yards yeah three sorry that would have been a truck how many beers this will never look the same as the way it does right now where the roof is open once this thing is enclosed it will forever be a dried in structure that's weatherproof that can survive the winter that's keeping you dry you could technically if there was no uh requirements for a certificate of occupancy from the county you could live in the structure as soon as you get dried in correct this is true you uh you know if you're one of those people that trying to do it you know out of pocket using trash trying to avoid having a mortgage you know you don't want to pay rent or a mortgage somewhere else it gets a little tricky yes there are some pockets of freedom areas around the country the united states as well as around the planet if you're in a pocket of freedom or reservation or someplace where they don't have code yeah the minute i get it roughed in i'm living in it i'm camping stove absolutely amex yeah i mean right so we're it's rustic but you're out of the elements you know you're not you're not dealing with the bugs let's get out into the sun and walk up on the top check the mic and make sure it sound right [Music] are we rolling you can see the can form it's a mortar mix no concrete this is not load bearing i made sure it was 10 inches high and basically a 10 inch id interior dimension for this bond beam pour so what we did was a couple days we went ahead and used all these aluminum cans which is really important for us here in taos county uh friday before last house county decided to close its recycling center which is really unfortunate because it took people a long time to get fully trained to start rinsing and separating and then driving all the way down to the recycling center and putting it in the proper bins and and so now all of a sudden that's gone which hopefully is not forever but for right now uh we used up you know a few thousand cans uh not just in the pack out but in the bond beam it's important to me to see something good happen where as right now it's going into the landfill [Music] the biggest mistake people make when they're building earthships or any structure of this kind that they think oh it's going to be a hobbit house it's going to be buried underground any type of burying your house underground even for the foundation of a conventional structure which you then put a stick frame on top of a poured concrete foundation you can mess this detail up and significantly uh impair your ability to warm and cool your structure passively this is super crucial this is a make it or break it moment for you as an owner builder if you mess this up you're going to have a huge problem keeping the temperature of the space comfortable and are probably going to be burning some kind of fuel source and have failed for those of you who know who know how a passive thermal heat storage system works this is what ron is referring to we are talking about not only passive solar but also the structure itself absorbing temperature and so you know we have almost i would say on this build what do you think that is five feet four feet five feet so we have five feet of battery because the walls are thermal mass they're made of tires and so they absorb temperature they transmute temperature just like brick walls or rock walls or concrete walls i'm looking at a big concrete bomb beam right here which is thermal mass i'm looking at dirt which continues all the way down to the foundation of building this is all dirt here and then now this is actually the perimeter of the thermal wrap which makes this into a thermal battery now there's also going to be insulation here too you cannot have a thermal break you've got r20 coming all the way up from below down at subgrade but now we've got to capture this so we don't let this outside air temperature or snow or rain or anything change the temperature of the battery the battery has to still sit at about 55 degrees and right now if i was to thermal probe this burial right here just in front of this insulation in plastic i would find that temperature be pretty stable probably a little bit warmer just because it's still been pretty hot low 80s so i'd have to dig down pretty deep in order to find that high 50 60 degree temperature but it's there that's a fact that's going to be there and i need to keep it there because october is coming next week then november december temperatures are not going to get much over 40 degrees for several months so this insulation blanket has to be captured pretty much right away so before anything charges it in a negative temperature way or with water i'm really thinking about this insulation in the skirting detail while the boys are starting to think about phase three of framing [Music] you know i've been holding this microphone on this beard the whole time well josh the beer mic the beer mic i invented the beer mic but i couldn't drink because if i did this it would make a sound like [Music] so it's friday morning before the job this week we've been getting the framing up and today we're going to be probably putting up some of the first roof rafters here usually ron has a group meeting we go over what we're going to do for the day and i thought that i could give you guys a look inside what that's like a day in the life of an earthship build last week's update i interviewed ron and we talked a little bit about some of the foundational details and told you what we were going to be doing this week and this week all the framing has gone up so now you can start to see what this building is going to look like when it's going to be completed with glass and metal flashing so things are getting exciting all right guys so here we are at the end of another work week uh we're aggressively moving through phase three of 11 phase three in the middle of october is extremely important so i had one of my carpenters build the window boxes in his workshop so they all came out perfect we pounded all our stem wall tires three courses leveled them really well put a vapor barrier in and then we put our plates on top of that ready to receive that perfectly dialed window boxes i did do an oversized front door because there's going to be a lot of gardening happening inside of this greenhouse so i actually have it where you can bring a wheelbarrow in without smashing all the framing we have our plates on the top that's ready to receive the greenhouse roof i don't know if we're going to get to it today we are ready with materials here with the 2 by 12's we're going to put 27 of them up there before all that we want to talk about the skylights so when we're doing the framing for this front greenhouse we want to prep for the boxes that are going to actually go over the 2x12s it's a detail that a lot of people are like questioning but for strength and for approval for the framing inspection we let them run all the way through we put the box on top so when you look up you do see framing inside of the skylight box but that's where you can hang your cam cleat and run your ropes so i like it for stability especially with high winds out here it locks down that that big box and that heavy lid you know a little tighter to that greenhouse roof inside the exterior greenhouse is the interior greenhouse same details very meticulous carpentry for your window boxes your door buck your pony walls your pony walls are going to typically receive plumbing and electrical so i didn't really explain that to my crew they just kind of made it happen now it's going to make more sense on the back end for them it's not just a matter of getting the framing up to receive plates and then the lamy beam the laminated beam is basically liquid nails and screws and ring shanks and you basically sandwich a bunch of two bys together to establish the height of where the roof line is actually going to be kind of finished so those projections off the lamy beam come up to the front greenhouse into the back where the bond beam connects to it all right [Music] now another important thing when it comes to an earthship is the tires turn out up front so what we did was and this was also filmed in an earlier session where we porcupine all the framing and then we come up with cans and cement mortar to actually grip it to the tire wall it's the bond beam of framing to the tires in this way so we've shown you earlier how you tie in a bond beam to the tires and now the plating's up there so one thing that the crew needs to know before we get too excited and finish up the lamy beam and jump on tji's because that's what we want to do we want to try to weatherproof this thing in so when the weather changes we have weather on sunday we have more weather coming in on tuesday we want to try to get on the roof as quickly as we can so we don't shut the job down and we're able to work every day till the finish line the next thing that has to happen is we have a plate that's locked down to the bond beam concrete and steel pour on top of that is another plate that plate is the sandwich plate that sandwich is going to come off and we're going to slip in an epdm it's a rubber liner it's ethylene propylene diene monomer it's 45 mil it's the thickness of a credit card one and a half so it's really really strong really durable we're also using it as a radon barrier in the house so there's already two rooms already have radon barriers underneath the building we'll get into more of that a little bit later so we want to sandwich the epdm in that way the thermal battery the tires essentially the entire body of the building is waterproof now so even if we got dumped with snow or rain it has a way to shed away far enough that we don't concern ourselves with a capillary effect the capillary effect would only happen if the dirt got wet and it just sucks it back in towards the back of the tires and eventually inside of the tires themselves and then ultimately into the tire wall on the inside no bueno we really want to waterproof this building for those who've already been watching you know that we have just begun the process of weatherproofing the building before the unpredictable rainy windy and snowy weather starts as for now i'm going to show you how we built the roof on the tiny house earthship this is an example of the roof from the tiny house in the beginning of the video and it gives you an idea of what we're going to be building on the tiny house we're working on currently so here's a preview of the roofing video and be sure to check it out when i release the full version if you're interested in all the details where we left off last week we had just finished framing the greenhouse and we're about to install the roof rafters putting up the roof rafters is the very first step to insulating and waterproofing the structure once it is completed we can begin working on the inside protected from the elements many have asked me about roofing alternatives for earthships which is why i'm extra excited to show you this detail with the price of lumber increasing due to supply chain issues caused by covid19 these manufactured lumber trusses are a no-brainer in the current economic landscape and unlike the excessive telephone poles used as roof rafters in the earthships of old designed by mike reynolds the manufactured joists that we are using on this build are a much more efficient use of material their lightweight design allows them to be carried by two people and you could effectively install the roof in one weekend with a friend not only does their design use less wood but it allows for the poly iso insulation panels to be sandwiched between the trusses we broke into teams to tackle the task one team was laying out the trusses and the other preparing the insulation panels the layout plan for the trusses is 16 inch on center after doing the math alan and johnny decided to start installing from the middle working their way out from east to west end this part of the process lays the foundation for every detail that follows and they must be precise now to avoid big mistakes later once they set the first rafters however the rest goes relatively quickly check the mic and make sure it sounds right boys [Music] once the last rafter was set we realized that we were going to be short one so instead of waiting a week for a delivery i decided to take things into my own hands so i fabricated a 20 foot long 14 inch tall laminated truss on site using two by fours two by twelves and some glue and some metal plates and nails i didn't end up filming the process it was late in the day in the evening when i made it but it involved a lot of clamps the glue had dried overnight by the time we were trying to hoist it up the ladder and this was probably the riskiest part i was confident that the rafter would hold up once it was installed but getting it there was kind of the issue it was a lot heavier than the manufactured trusses that we had purchased but we managed to make it work josh and i had been preparing 16 inch wide panels of poly iso to be inserted into the trusses we had to gear up with respirators just to be able to cut the foam which is full of microscopic glass fibers it's a very itchy situation and you certainly don't want to breathe in the fiberglass dust that clouds around the saw and here's the dust from a different angle [Music] for those of you been watching closely we said in a previous video that the insulation in this house would be made of recycled textile which would have increased the r value to 100 however that material recently went out of production so we had to go with plan b we ended up stacking three pieces of three inch thick poly iso foam board in the cavity the resulting nine inches of foam will have an r value of 78 a number that surpasses our benchmark for performance in fact it still surpasses energy star's recommended r value of 50 to 60 for the attic of a house built in the coldest climate zones in the united states of america unfortunately that's as far as i got editing the roof video so that's all you're going to see for now next we're going to be installing the rim joist laying plywood putting the ice in water guard and then doing the metal roofing so there's a lot of juicy details coming up stay tuned for the roofing video if you want to see how everything comes together unfortunately johnny won't be here to finish the roof with us he's leaving for florida so goodbye florida man safe travels but i didn't want johnny to leave without building the earthship model kit so i busted out a copy and johnny had a lot of fun putting it together for those of you who don't know earthship model kit is the independent study project that i did for the earthship academy where i took everything i learned and made a scaled-down version of a real earthship with a accurate floor plan of a 900 square foot studio home the high quality full color die cut model includes 12 pieces that make it easy to assemble the architecturally accurate model it comes with easy to understand instructions and a 32-page full-color informational guide that teaches you the six principles that make earthship some of the most sustainable buildings in the world [Music] last week was roofing week and in last week's update we had just started the roof by putting up the rafters and the insulation then we begin installing the plywood unlike the roof on the first tiny house that ron built this house has only two penetrations in the roof where the hot air will escape from the greenhouse through the vent box openings so we cut a hole in the plywood where the vent boxes will be installed check the mic and make sure it sound right boys for those of you been watching you might have remembered that we left an epdm skirt vapor barrier draped outside the house perimeter because the north roof is hanging over the exposed ground we need to create a barrier between the ground and the wood of the roof so that we don't get raw in the future and all of that is capped with a metal drip edge as we transition now into waterproofing the plywood and putting the metal roof on [Music] with the drip edge installed we began rolling out the bichothane waterproofing membrane [Music] with the waterproofing membrane installed and the vent box openings framed and cut it was time to install the classic earthship green water harvesting safe metal roof [Music] working in the windy mesa never leaves a dull moment on the job site [Music] we worked until the sun went down and the moon came out [Music] in regards to the roof what you just saw that was the easy part a quality roof is in the small details and i think i'm going to save those for another video this video picks up where we left off in the last update having just finished installing the metal roofing and glass on the earthship tiny house it also included an awesome live demo with ron filled with pro tips on glass installation so if you missed out on that there's a link in the description like i said in last week's video there are a ton of intricate metal details required to get this roof over the finish line and in this video i don't intend to cover all of them there is so much more i would like to cover inside the house as we begin to work on the exciting finishing touches but let me know if that's something you would like to see more of in the comments below and if there is enough interest i'll make a dedicated series covering metal roofing but for now here's a brief overview check the mic and make sure it sound right boy [Music] we begin by insulating and waterproofing the east and west walls [Music] and the vent box openings then we installed metal flashing over the vapor barrier in the areas that are going to be buried this protects the foam insulation from the elements including any critters that might want to chew through the walls the gutters were fabricated on site and installed on the north side we connected them to the cisterns in preparation for harvesting rainwater and snow melt meanwhile on the front face we flash the facade around the doors and above the windows fabricating the custom pieces on site with our 12-foot metal bender also known as a break having access to a break makes metal work much more adaptable instead of relying entirely on prefabricated pieces you can buy flat stock and make anything you need [Music] is [Music] around the windows we waterproof the remainder of the exposed wood with an adhesive membrane we were nervous working around the windows knowing that it's a delicate process and accidents can always happen in the end we weren't able to prevent the inevitable and ended up breaking a pane of glass anyways even though tempered glass can withstand direct impacts on its face one blow to the edge or corner can shatter the entire pain in this case it was a blow to the edge of the glass with the stapler that led to the carnage [Music] now let's watch that again in slow-mo [Music] this set us back slightly when it came time to install the mullion caps a frame of thick metal that waterproofs the windows once the million caps are set the windows are sealed however with the pane broken we had to wait to finish the job in the meantime i worked on building and installing the operable vent box lids and i could make a whole video just about that but for now here's the short version we cut the foam and added a 2x4 where the hinges will connect to the bases then we wrap the bases in sheet metal and began fabricating the lids the lids are framed and insulated with a layer of metal flashing on the underside this helps shed moisture that builds up on the inside of the lid from the humidity in the greenhouse as hot air rises i wrap the outside of the box in a waterproofing membrane and then metal flashing the lid is designed to have a basket on the backside which you can fill with weights so that it opens by itself without motors or gearboxes one opens the vent from the inside using a rope that hangs down in the greenhouse it's pretty cool so it works out but moving back to the front face the broken window was finally replaced and we were able to install the mullion caps an unforgiving process in which each plate of metal is glued down to the glass with a thick bead of tar putty called butyl tape there are no second chances once the frame is set you can't peel it off unless you really left up we took our time and everything went smoothly stepping back at the end of the day our work looked great the next day it was time to hang the door a triumphant moment to be a part of a moment that marked measurable progress a moment that stood out from the daily grind and became a measurement of how far we had just come from dirt to doorknob literally our journey started in a pile of dirt and after months of hard work we just installed the doorknob well that's it for this video but don't worry there's plenty more work to be done and as always i'll be here to keep you up to speed as we move inside and start making this house a home and that was the last update that i posted from the field in taos after that i left the crew to go enjoy the holidays with my family and over new year's i celebrated the one year anniversary of the channel and it's incredible to think that this channel started in november of 2020 when i was in quarantine editing the documentary ships in pennsylvania which is the first of my videos to get over a hundred thousand views check it out and for the premiere of this channel i'm going to be releasing a series of videos covering the documentation of a radical architectural movement emerging in pennsylvania for the next two months i'm going to be releasing interviews home tours and a full-length documentary i'll be introducing you to a community of trailblazers whose alternative ideas have resulted in the construction of three unique and inspirational structures to start telling this story i'd like to take you on a trip down memory lane and show you some photos from a time before i was filming my life for the off-grid guru well when i got to pennsylvania it turned out that there were actually two projects the first one was a restoration project where we were going to rebuild an existing greenhouse and the second was a groundbreaking standalone structure near philadelphia this earthship inspired greenhouse was the first of its kind in america to be built within city limits in this video i'm going to be taking a look back on the restoration project that we did at stonehenge gardens in tamaqua pennsylvania the first thing i noticed when i arrived at stonehenge was the peaceful atmosphere the beautiful lakes waterfalls and also a really interesting stone orb that was in the garden when you first entered [Music] after taking a look around i immediately noticed a greenhouse that had fallen into disrepair over the years it was so obvious that this is the project that we were going to be working on it already looked like an earthship it just needed a new life brought to it so we immediately started putting some love into the structure by removing the ugly moss-covered panes of plastic and then tearing down the aluminum frame giving us a clear slate to build from [Music] with the opportunity to excavate a channel for the gray water botanical cell before we started closing in the structure it was just an ideal time to do the digging and really saved a lot of sweat and man hours to be able to just have an excavator come we couldn't tell that there was a gravel floor in the old greenhouse until we started digging at which point it revealed that there was about a foot of gravel underneath for drainage so that was great this is probably my favorite moment of the entire build when lauren discovered that we had pounded the first tires she was so surprised you know tire pounding is something that i'm just so used to after having done the earship academy but of course it's pretty strange for most people who've never seen it so when we started pounding the first tires at the greenhouse build here it was a really monumentous occasion the co-owner of stonehedge gardens tom even came down and pounded a tire himself as well as many many more volunteers who came and helped us this really labor-intensive process is actually an excellent way to reuse something that would normally just be thrown away in a landfill by ramming earth into the tires you form a structural block that can be used for the foundation and even the walls of a house because the construction of this tire wall started on either side and then met in the middle when the tire wall met itself there was an awkward space that was later filled with concrete in order to even out the foundation a classic earthship building technique using cans and mortar was used in other awkward areas the next step for the foundational wall after the tires was something called a bond beam which connects all the tires together and also forms a stable and level surface for the framing to be built upon all right so i know that it's a little hard to understand what we're doing here in the photos so i just wanted to bring us over to the whiteboard and i could do a drawing it'll be a lot easier to explain what we're doing and what we're trying to achieve so we've already seen how we pounded a tire wall for the foundation of the greenhouse but that's not where we're at yet i'm just going to back us up a few steps to the beginning when we dug a trench in this system the idea is to minimize the amount of outside water that we have to bring in in order to water our plants instead the design utilizes a rubber lined planter bed which contains and treats water that was normally just flushed down the drain from the showers and sinks and instead is being reused one more time to water the plants in the greenhouse before it has finally flushed out into the septic field so that's just a complicated way of saying that you're wasting less water because every time you take a shower you're watering the plants in the greenhouse whenever you use the sink you're watering the plants in the greenhouse so this is just a system that is reusing the water that comes from the farmhouse before we installed the bond beam i had been tearing down some of the wood and discovered that there were termites mostly because when i went inside and looked in the mirror i could see them crawling in my hair but anyways it was a major setback we had to wait for the exterminator to come and then eventually we had to replace the studs and put some new sill plates up and after that we were ready to move on things started to really take shape once the framing was installed by far the trickiest part of the process was the angle it would have been much much easier to have just done a vertical 90 degree face but because this is a passive solar greenhouse the angle is required to capture the winter sun well it is pennsylvania so it ended up raining before we were able to get the roof closed in and that actually proved to us that the greywater cell would hold water that was great because it meant that there were no leaks but it also meant that we were standing in water while we were working so we ended up having to come up with some solutions to pump the water out [Music] you could feel the tension in the air the day that the glass was installed if we had done everything correctly each pane of glass should fit perfectly in the window frame with no effort and that's exactly what they did as each pane of glass was put in the entire character of the building changed as the reflection on the surface of the glass grew showing the sky above us i stayed on the project for quite some time after that but don't seem to have any photos unfortunately that's as far as my documentation goes for this project however i was able to see the finished greenhouse when i returned in the fall of 2020 it was really incredible to just stand in the greenhouse so full of life just taking a look around at the result of all of the hard work of all of the people that were involved in the project and really just getting a chance to come back and see the fruit of our labor just looking down at the floor and the walls knowing how much recycled material went into building this structure from the bricks in the floor to the glass bottles and the walls they were all materials that were going to be thrown out that were given a second life inside the structure [Music] well that was it for this video i hope you liked it next video we're going to be taking a look at will vogler's greenhouse in his backyard near philadelphia as well as a home tour of a residential earthship in pennsylvania and a full-length documentary so if you don't want to miss out then be sure to like and subscribe [Music] i showed up in the backyard of will vogler a family man who was determined to prove that alternative building techniques could work in pennsylvania welcome eric i'm really glad to be doing this with you here on site how cool is that yeah this is really inspirational and exciting i just drove down from new york last week three hours here to pennsylvania it's just outside of philadelphia so this is actually the first earthship build within a major u.s city which is super exciting which is going to push this really out into the mainstream and make it more accessible more palatable for a lot of people the first time i encountered our ships was on family vacation i rented one me and my family i was about 14 years old and i became super mega inspired by the fact that they were using recycled materials in these buildings that there were palm trees growing inside parakeets in the greenhouse the whole thing was just absolutely mind-blowing for a little 14 year old me and so i had my eyes dead set on learning how these things worked and right now i'm back on the ground here in pennsylvania building this model this greenhouse in someone's backyard so it's just a great opportunity to be here and also to share this information which i've turned from something that is really kind of hard to understand from the beginning for most people you know what you're telling me you're taking garbage and building houses with it you know you're growing your own food inside you're you know containing and treating your own sewage or capturing rain water you don't need any air conditioners or heating systems to heat and cool your home you're essentially not really paying any bills once the house is you know constructed so it's a little bit over the top to believe and it's a bit far out but it's real and it's happening and it could be happening in your backyard and anyone can do it you know you can go off-grid you can be sustainable there's a real on-the-ground movement that's happening in this day and age i mean it just so happened that my wife she's a nutritionist and so we had always been trying to work with different greenhouses growing our own food it was struggling you know then we had to learn all about greenhouses and greenhouses have a short window of usefulness so our goal was to create something that we could use year-round and an earthshift type structure just made sense you know 60 to 70 degrees year round in order to achieve this constant year-round temperature half of will's greenhouse is buried under the ground in order to reuse as many recyclable materials as possible the building material of choice for this greenhouse was old car tires rammed with dirt this really labor intensive process is actually an excellent way to reuse something that would normally just be thrown away in a landfill by ramming earth into the tires you form a structural block that can be used for the foundation and even the walls of a house the first day at the amber build was definitely a memorable one i don't know if i've ever pounded just absolutely wet mud into tires but it's not fun when things did eventually dry up we were able to make some headway and get some work done on these walls will's son dominic came out to help us and it was really cute we got dominic here pounding his first tire dominic what are you doing oh he's going for the good job buddy you need a level [Music] [Music] in order to transition from the tire wall to framing the window boxes a form was built that was reinforced with steel rebar and then concrete was poured in as well as some threaded rod that was pressed down into the form to create a level surface that we could later build the window boxes on top of [Music] [Music] so [Music] will had told friends and local bars what he was doing and had amassed a huge collection of old glass bottles by cutting the bottles in half and taping them together a brick is formed that one can use to make a bottle brick wall compared to pounding tires this technique is a lot less labor intensive and can really get the whole team in a good spirit this is the second way in which this greenhouse consumes something that would normally be thrown out well my time with the project was up so this was the last thing that i saw of the greenhouse i took a few selfies and was on my way [Music] nikki rhodes who was able to stay for the finishing of this project provided the documentation and videos that i'm about to show you now [Music] all right what are you doing nikki i'm uh finishing this bottle wall putting a final layer of concrete on and then we're gonna clean it off clean off all the bottles just like this to create that beautiful stained glass effect from the bottles the lighting's horrible it's all right so the bottoms are sticking out and you're going to pack that and eventually it's going to start looking like this [Music] [Music] that's it for this video but the story doesn't end there after the completion of the earthship inspired greenhouse will founded something called the tamaqua sustainability project when him and his father and a group of volunteers built an off-the-grid homestead and educational center in pennsylvania up next i'm going to be releasing a documentary home tours and interviews surrounding this inspirational project so if that's something that interests you then be sure to subscribe in this video i'd like to introduce you to bill vogler a kind man with a big heart who is currently building an off-the-grid homestead in pennsylvania after his son will built an earthship inspired greenhouse in his backyard they decided to take the experiment to the next level they decided to build a home that will free them from having to pay rent and utility bills every month the house is still in mid-construction and they faced major setbacks due to covet 19 in the year 2020. in this interview bill is going to share his story with all of us and take us on a tour around the work site of his future homestead [Music] so you brought this all the way from texas yeah and then i went down by train and got i don't know well it's been a while since i had it on taxes lived on galveston for a while then hitchcock for a while which is just across the causeway and then i was in dickinson with this rv all right and uh where we were was where uh harvey yeah flooded everything i pictured this van with a water all the way up to the windows oh geez we just everything uh you're kind of looking at is pretty much new or in progress because we got shut down uh because of the coronavirus and then may or june i just started working on it so we just a couple months ago got the trim on the front and then we tried to get this closed up so that was like july august we put the windows in well by putting the windows in i made the frames okay because that's 20 some frames i had to make and it takes about a day for each one of those so you got 20 windows it took a month all right so then uh yeah it'd be september we stuck the windows in fortunately they fit you know all kind of so how long were you traveling before well i laughed a week before harvey came in right but the year before we were up here uh poconos and like looking for land and i brought this up and did a couple of the parks up here so i kind of knew the area and then uh will said hey you know tamakwa is allowing us to build these homes i said okay i looked on the internet and there was just 18 19 acres here uh-huh so i told him i said go look at it so he he liked it so we bought it that was 2018 two years ago yeah yeah yeah yeah and then uh yeah six months he kept saying come up come up come up you know they're finishing the thing at stoneheads and this is going to be done then mine will be next so i finally came up yeah we went through all the problems with the telling us that the land was wetland you couldn't have a road on it would have to get special permission that would take two or three years yeah so you have to learn to play the game yep [Music] yeah this is bill vogler this is my house and we're going to take a look inside and see how far we've come this is a coffin door they call it and uh it'll have more decoration through here it was just so heavy i wanted to get it up now and then i can decorate it this is g she is a full bread collie out of oklahoma and she drank all those beers those bottles are for the wall and people contribute so see yes so we have a drain here this is a mud room uh it's uh have the same kind of door you can see we have the archway i was putting in and the idea is that the air from the outside will come in here we close this door before we open that door this is just part of that drain that's going to go across in the middle over there is where the septic system goes out that's our bathroom this is our first bedroom our supply room right now so a little bit everything there this table has uh well plywood on it and the idea is it's perfectly flat to make doors so you put your plywood on here and screw it down make sure everything's flat before you build your door so and then of course miter saw got to have miter saw yeah you don't have that you're not going anywhere and it gives you an idea of the view from up here a couple weeks ago we had yellows and reds and greens it was real pretty they just turned brown overnight right this is our bathroom and you can see we've just put the pipe in there and we have some hole in the ground yet so you just started doing the drain plumbing here right yeah we haven't put the water in yet and we have a lot of parts and i can actually run the washing machine so if i put this in then i can run the washing machine the solar panels because i don't have them on the front yet but you can see the wires coming in and somebody was wondering how difficult it is to put your solar panels in uh it's snapped together technology okay so you they come right off the panel you can buy an extender cable and you just put them together and then run them into the fire converter charge controller directly hooked into the solar panels and it has a picture of the solar panels solar panels i am just laying on the roof all right uh this is uh six of them but we have some other ones like the white one up there is running the fans that's all it took to run the pan and then i have a couple i haven't put up the uh there's a couple more down by the rv and the other van and they're keeping the batteries hot you know so if i go down there and start that van it'll fire right up 74 78 volts 101 you know that's what's coming in now it pulses to charge the batteries so you can see this up and down but normally in a when the sun's out that'll be like 25 or 30. okay and this now it's saying the batteries are down because i've been using it so they're running uh 21 volts normally it would be 24 volts so that's why it's beeping it's trying to tell me i got a strain on it yeah and if you can see we're rainy it's it's terrible weather outside so it's yeah it's struggling but has this been doing well oh yeah normally even you've been able to charge your batteries i've been able to run the refrigerator the microwave that's a thousand you know a kilowatt microwave uh-huh uh i just wait for like 10 o'clock thereabouts and this thing will have both green lights on and yeah you can make coffee whatever you want [Music] and everything has to work together you know it's like we were talking about well turn the lights on well it all has to feed back to the panel and there's two systems i have uh the dc lights like on a day like today where it's been raining all day i'm mostly on dc yeah we have these this is 24 volt lights so we're not just dependent on the power inverter all right so i can have those on at night things like that and uh it'll light the place up their yard lights okay uh the ones they put on the walkways and the like and the box that comes in it will actually say 12 volt you know supply battery operated so i just picked them up at lowe's and i just put the two of them together to make 24 volts so that's why there's two of them on so what's this thing the amateur radio if you're out in the woods they actually have what they call wilderness protocol for injured campers or hikers so if you need medical help you can hit it on the repeater and they're on the mountain tops almost every mountaintop every state so if they linked everything you could actually talk to california so but here uh schuylkill county they just have four uh transmitters they they pick up and retransmit whatever you say right and the uh the radio you've heard that's on dc it works in the car so we have it in there she works for sign language okay so trying to think what else i could get her to do but what's it sit sit see it doesn't work if you tell her all right so you might be wondering this is an earthship house right well not quite typically earthship homes are built using tires rammed with dirt for a few reasons first of all it's a way to reuse something that people normally throw in the garbage second it's pretty economical because you can usually get tires and dirt for free but lastly and most importantly depending on where you live the design of the house can utilize the thick earth-filled walls in order to eliminate your heating and cooling bills and even though will had used tires to build his greenhouse bill's house is built using cinder block filled with concrete in theory as long as the house is built correctly the cinder block wall should still have the same energy saving effect well the contractor did the hard part okay you know she did the hard part he laid the block uh put the footer in measured it out he had the uh ran the dozer to um you know dig it out and put the cistern in we have a cistern 2 000 gallon cistern so he figured all that out you know and then once we had the trusses on uh he put the roof on but then we had to stop yeah so winter came and went and then we got back to it yeah and that's coming again so for people who don't know how this type of system works what's the idea here well it's the same thing as getting heat from the earth your back wall is covered with dirt or you have tires and the idea that it comes up to the earth's temperature which is like 60 degrees and that radiates into the house all right underground is going to be at the same temperature so if you're 100 degrees you're drawing air through there you're getting 60 degrees into your area now this is on solar so it's not costing us any energy you don't have to pay for it now what's going to happen here the reason this is like three feet below uh we're going to play with the freeze line okay with some insulation probably just come back you know and it'll be under that drip thing and then it'll be filled with dirt the idea is to keep uh keep your dirt from freezing and then it keeps the house warm this is something i haven't seen actually so uh there's one by every cooling bed did you come up with that uh well will was using it in his greenhouse right because he was having uh moisture problems and so he picked up a solar operated fan and it helped him a lot so he sent me three of them i got two of them in i got one more put in but it also brings the air in from the cooling tubes where the cooling tubes come in the building well they're right outside here you can see the depth this would be where one of them is this is another one and they go into the rooms the one room uh well we got stuff stuck in it conduit and whatever but it goes back to the back wall all the way to the back wall all the way the back wall in that corner and you can see where the pipes are and then it'll come up like a regular register okay so we can open it or close it as we will all right so what are they talking about here basically they're talking about getting free air conditioning by burying a tube under the house that hot air is going to move through and cool down and then come into the building as cool air and in the winter when you want to keep the warmth inside the house you're going to close off the vents that are in the floor so that the cool air doesn't come into the warm room and the final thing that bill isn't mentioning here is that all of the glass on the house is facing in the southern direction because in the winter the sun comes up in the southern sky comes in through the windows of the house and warms up the space so we're in a rush for this weekend we're going to do bottle walls and the idea is to get these doors so we can seal the thing up you know we worked with wheels down in uh ambler and it took quite a bit to get those bottles in but and it's a multiple process you get your bottles in and then you got to come back and fill it in and then you have to clean your bottles and he was doing a uh a pattern you know like a swirl you know and i've seen some of them where they have a phoenix and all kind of stuff it's kind of neat they asked me how many bottles i wanted to work on i said i'll do one [Music] time consuming so we have a few small rocks i told will he can start his rock garden with that one but we're going to use them for decoration um yeah the solar panel now this is the internet so it's huge net now we have another dish that that will go for uh geos 19 satellite and it should give us 253 channels for free okay and they're all in the same direction all right we have our gutter system we only have the back gutter on what we needed to catch most of water and of course it's going into the cistern two thousand gallon cistern and yes usually when i look at it it's usually full so what are you standing on right here uh this is the cistern right through here and you can see this is the entrance and there's just uh it ends but then these are possible openings if we wanted them and well you can still see part of the cistern this is this whole area it's just one big tank now we have it on this side so if we want another one if we don't get have enough water we can put another one in so all the water right now is just coming from this tank right off yeah right into this tank right off the roof into the tank come out every couple days get the leaves out yeah out in the woods you can have leaves and then like i say once we get the more of the roof on we'll have those wings to actually catch some more water you're gonna get some incredible sunsets oh yeah yeah i mean we've got all these windows to watch it too [Music] the story doesn't end there they've begun using this house as a classroom when they form something called the tamakwa sustainability project and hosting workshops in order to teach people these unique skills in the fall of 2020 i was invited to teach a bottle brick wall workshop i took the opportunity to meet everyone that was involved one-on-one to hear their unique stories and to share them with all of you when i got involved with will and bill three or four years ago at this point we were just building a little greenhouse in will's backyard all right what are you doing nikki i'm uh finishing this bottle wall putting a final layer of concrete on then we're gonna clean it off clean off all the bottles just like this to create that beautiful stained glass effect from the bottles and that project served as a prototype um for this project which is a single-family home on 18 acres of land and the vision for this site is 18 acres of experimental architecture so this weekend's bottle workshop was our very first um community workshop that we we've run and uh we really wanted to you know bring a group of students in both to share the uh skills and resources and knowledge that we've gained just by doing these projects you know provide students with a sense of confidence that they too can build um like this um and also to get a little bit more work done on the house that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to do yeah i feel like we went in here knowing relatively little about you know we were kind of in a one-frame mindset about okay we'll build a cob house you know because we talked to some people about that but yeah we met so many people with so many different opinions about you know what kind of materials are good for which kind of climates i think uh i think this has expanded my uh my mindset about exactly how we could go about doing what we want to do and uh it's also given us a lot of great connections really cool people came to this thing experience yeah and lots of experienced people as well who know what they're talking about and who we'd love to stay in touch with yeah i mean it was really cool to work on the earthship uh with will and bill you know that was really good experience it's really good to get some hard labor in like especially working with the earth i think that's really important i don't really get a lot of that like being in the city living in an apartment i don't really have access to like land or much less land that i can dig up and like work with my hands and my feet and but having been able to do in the past month it's like it feels great and you know it feels great to like wake up sore and it's just it feels like it's really needed and i feel like i feel stronger uh so it's a great kind of side thing that i didn't see coming great benefit that i didn't see coming are we filming right now we are now we're on camera hold on hold on okay it's been cut i need to edit it was cool to be able to physically build something you know to get to to follow a process from from start to finish you know to be in the midst of a project like this that's like going on and just to hear from people that are working on it that have worked on it on different iterations of like something like an earthship you know yeah and just like a different um lens to try to like learn something instead of just reading about in a book or watching like youtube video on it or something to actually just like fall into it in person and have you know a more tangible experience to then start your education is it bill that lives there i just mixed bill and well left like good names but it was it was like honestly i really liked hearing him talking like everything he had to say about like solar panels and like the energy he uses and like the water yeah the water like i i felt like every time like he like had a moment to just like sit down and talk to people it was like yeah i got i got a lot out of that um i got a lot out of like the hands-on yeah i don't know if i've ever been a part of anything that like kind of free you into it this much like here hop on this power tool yeah like like wash all these things so that was definitely helpful to like see see like what goes into like building these walls the difference between you know sustainability of a traditional house versus an earth house uh if you buy your own land and build your own house on it um then you're just paying you're not paying mortgage yeah i mean you're paying for the cost of building a house in the first place but not having to buy something that somebody else built is a huge money saver if you if you follow an earth ship built there's a lot of little things you can do to cut down on your bills or not have bills for instance electricity and so if you don't have a mortgage and you don't have bills yeah if you're using solar power and water power yeah sounds like a pretty good deal to me excited about that life yeah well my name is tom morose and i'm the co-director co-owner of stonehedge gardens it's a holistic learning center tobacco sustainability project is now located just about three miles north of stonehedge stonehenge has been around for over 50 years and there was a greenhouse attached to the farmhouse that was basically falling apart and we had a colleague run into somebody that was building a greenhouse in ambler and we you know we decided to use the earthship technology to rebuild our greenhouse and then through that we got connected through uh to will and his project there was a lot of similarities so we got you know we got to talking and um i think will was exploring you know places where he might be able to build an earthship building a an off-grid passive solar house in tomoko that's really to me what's what's most interesting about this project i got interested in natural building from the perspective of being interested in preserving the earth and not destroying the wonderful natural world that we live in which is what's going on so how how can we live without destroying where we live that's what i'm interested in [Music] yeah we hope that this initial bottle break workshop will serve as a foundation for many more workshops to come um we have a lot of ideas um including earthen floors and perhaps aircrete and maybe hemp creek other types of um experimental building materials and we're really excited for bill's borough and and just the democracy sustainability project in general as a platform for knowledge exploration and material exploration and exploration in community and exploration and ecology you know when i got involved with this project and with building earthships in general i noticed immediately that there was a close connection um between the designer and the builder and the actual structure and also the earth and you know the systems that exist such as the sun and the ground and rain and you know i don't necessarily think that earthships by themselves are the uh is a panacea for all of the problems that we face as a society however i think the philosophies that they're built off of um you know which include being closer to the earth and nature um and also closer to ourselves i think that it's these ideas that we have to adopt on a greater scale well that's the end of the video but it's not the end of the story my 2022 is already jam-packed and as always i'm going to be sharing my adventures with all of you and thank you for riding off-grid guru airlines we hope you enjoyed your flight and we'd like to see you on board again [Music] you

Channel: The Off Grid Guru

Views: 275,600

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Id: o5lJs0GdMsE

Length: 184min 9sec (11049 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022