Off-Grid DIY Underground Earthbag Pantry, Root Cellar, and Storm Shelter | Full Build Documentary

[Music] hello everybody welcome to terraform together and our homestead project i am super excited to introduce you guys to a new project we are working on today um this project it took us about nine months to complete the intent behind it was to basically create a community pantry now that we've had this retailer for over a year now it's been a great great addition to the property it's used as our community pantry for all of our eco residents and basically maintains a solid temperature with no electricity usage no anything it's really amazing so i hope you enjoy be sure to [Music] up subscribe new world where everyone is sacred every life accounted for grow your guard and find your tribe [Music] the next project we got going has to do with this massive pile of dirt and here's the hole for our root cellar so this is going to give us a nice spot to keep things cool without electricity this is probably 12 by 12 by about eight feet deep um so once we're all said and done it should be about ten by ten uh and about seven feet something like that be putting gravel down here as a base and then um start building it up start getting the stairs uh really excited about this project again another thing we've been wanting to get done for since we've been out here four months now so yeah that's our update for today i'm really excited we've been trying to get this done for like four months now and so but really excited to get a shovel i'm gonna get so strong um because we're just gonna be shoveling and for the next like two or three months all summer [Music] just to kind of give you guys an idea of what happens inside those bags once they dry out this was just a piece of clay that i pulled out before we put it in the bags this was just compressed by hand and it's very rock solid once these are compressed i mean they basically become one big rock and then the barbed wire down there is what kind of holds all these big rocks together right let's try this maybe two legs so here's our second row i think what i want to do is fill up gravel up to this point and that's just to kind of help with any flooding that may happen we do get pretty big monsoons alright everybody it is day five on the root seller build and i think we're making good progress may not get it done in just one month but we'll see today my goals are take this wood and make a shoot and get all of this gravel into the hole [Music] do [Music] here's where we're at i got all the gravel another close to two tons um down in the hole and our foundation's done um so this gravel here and the gravel out there just basically kind of locks the sandbags into place so as we get taller they have a solid foundation this gravel here is very loose and so it will also act as basically a big french drain it's about a foot deep and so basically we can get a foot of water in here before we would even notice it the ground will kind of funnel everything out eventually that was important because we do get some pretty big monsoons a lot of flash flooding that kind of stuff around here so one of the kind of sad things is um we put so much work into getting um two and a half rows high this one's actually up and so um two and a half rows high uh but now that we've covered it all uh you can't actually tell we've done a lot all right it's the end of day five and we got third row done we got all the gravel in and so our foundation's done at least [Music] last bag of day six and we are done with um course number five uh so this is an exciting one um because we have our door frame uh ready to go so that'll go in tomorrow we've been killing it today it doesn't look as impressive over here because it's been backfilled with our floor but look down here it's really cool so this is um five courses high i don't know up to about my knee we're gonna finish this and then we have our celebration beer for getting to this mile marker and i think this is the most disgusting shirt i've ever had and that's saying a lot because i did three months on the pct uh i'm just seeing how long this thing will last our victory beer for getting the first five rows done the foundation done and getting just before prepped for the door frame um because i learned in three tiny house builds that i'm a child and respond to rewards for accomplishments very well so we're finishing up day seven today's a little bit of a slower day uh we kind of killed it yesterday and got two courses done and so both of us are pretty sore and pete today but a little bit of progress was made uh so up here katie got the door frame uh suzuki bond so burned um i'll show some footage of that and we got all that cut measured all that and then um i did a supply run into town and got the electrical rough in um so we'll run electricity down here again i want to be able to have a kegerator down here um may do some grow lights or something whenever the weather is not cooperating in the winter so we can still do some food production down here started making some of our bracings so these gnarly looking guys and all that is is scrap wood and nails and so we'll we'll run some nails down and have the nails up and once we put bags on it they'll be locked into place and then basically the door framing gets screwed into there so it gives us something to screw into because uh yeah these clay bags can't really screw into them the other thing i got purchased and cut was our down vent and so this is just a three inch abs pipe and this will get covered with a bag go straight up and come out the top and then um we'll have a second vent up top here um so once we get bags higher it'll come here and basically cool air sinks so the cool air comes down that pipe goes through here and then comes out the high end of the pipe so that we don't get a whole lot of moisture issues down here mold issues things like that we have our door frame in so this was all um cole wood from uh home depot and then katie did the sausukiban on it to seal it and we got it installed uh the other big thing we did was get our house wrap in yeah show off [Music] smack it smack it hard we are done with course number eight and we have started on the stairs going out so tell me what happened i burned my pinky with the string it's right there did a finger burn i'm broken my poor left hand i can only tamp with my right hand there's so much blood in this build on barbed wire over here from right there [Music] we are changing course a little bit on here today is our last day working on this for about a month um because katie's going up to washington uh next week and we're gonna tarp it and get back at it later so um we're pushing today on the stairs to get as much of that done as we can [Music] it's been in the afternoon uh getting some of this filled in uh just backfilling it's kind of the worst part of these builds [Music] we just got done course number 27 uh so we'll have 30 courses all said and done 31 and yeah getting so close so we're not trying to knock out one course tomorrow two courses the next day uh the plan here is to build this up to um we're gonna start at ground level and then kind of hill up here um we'll do some rebar a little half circles and then cob over that so it'll all just kind of blend into the earth we are finishing up our last course before the roofing rafters goes on so yeah it's been a lot of work we've been cranking for about a month now a month ago it was a little bit above that little base plate there so our nailing plate finishing up the day uh completely exhausted so dirty but getting so close to getting the roof on so the plan is to get that done tomorrow and then it's a usable space a space that's cool i've got some beer that is ready to go in the root cellar very excited to get that done [Music] i'm super grateful to all of our work wares that come out and help and just kill it every single day yeah and so so so close to getting the roof on got our first rafters they're basically scrap metal so we got eight 20-foot pieces for 200 bucks which super exciting today's projects i'm cutting the door we're getting that door installed getting that ready for the next course and we've got katie and amy over here sealing our wood for the roof so that's our roof sheeting um nick is over there cutting down our metal so we'll get electricity in here today get the kegerator down in there today um we got some cool stuff this will be our exterior door [Music] this is actually a door from the habitat for humanity restore it was a old high school gym locker and our work aware that cut it down it was actually really funny he was saying that he smelled a lot of sawdust in his life but for some reason this smelled like a residual 30 years worth of pee so i guess it is soaked into the fibers of the wood which is really funny and i'm glad i didn't have to do it um but so we got this all framed out we gotta swap this around a little bit and get a new lock for it because right now it's a little bit of a dungeon situation um once we get the roof on there could in theory lock somebody in and they could never come out so we'll swap this around for a door handle and a another lock so this thing's also falling apart and so it's time to replace it i've tried to take these apart before and it was just just not happening so what i think i'm going to have to do because i couldn't figure out how to bust this off last time is angle grind it so we're going to chop it up i got a new lock to replace it and then people won't be able to get locked in the dungeon so that's always a positive [Music] alright so there has been a development you get figured out just hit with the hammer uh so i was like why is this not coming out this has to come apart like that went together some way hit it hard enough and this little cover thingy so cover thing we popped off and there's our screws to get it off i knew there was a way to get this off i just could not figure it out for the life of me [Music] there we go we are new lock and no more creepy dungeony vibe shots all that fun stuff so yeah that took way longer than i thought it was going to be but everything does so this is all of our roof sheeting we got all this stained and sealed today so basically on the bottom of it we put just a standard low voc polyurethane and then on the top of it a suggestion from an old homesteader out here was to use used motor oil so that's on the top of this and basically termites heat it it soaks into the wood it makes it toxic to bugs so they don't touch it and it also helps waterproof [Music] we got the roof sheeting on we got it all back filled we got the roof rafters on we did good on top of this sheeting we're going to be doing asphalt paper so ignore the mess this will all get cleaned up very soon um we've got some asphalt paper and then on top of that all the way on the other side of the build site we have some roofing metal so all the um metal for the studs or rafters roofing metal i got from a scrap and salvage shop so they sell it by the pound killer deal so this is all nice sealed up waterproof uh the next several days slash weeks uh we're gonna start taking dirt from here and piling it right on top of this um to help better insulate it i want to get at least a foot on there of insulation all right i'm down here in the root cellar and it is a usable space which is really cool ladies got a couple rows of uh the stairs done um we got the metal on the roof and then my project largely today was to get electricity down here um so we've got lights we've got the kegerator working and right now i'm working on uh getting some of my beer over here in the car boys uh into secondary for fermentation just got the last course finish up last stair finished up so no more full courses for the entirety of this build we have this last step elevated um about probably 12 ish inches just as a safety precaution so that if for whatever reason there is any flooding in here we've got a good foot of water before it ever gets down into the main root cellar shouldn't really be an issue considering the drainage goes way out there it's coming along really really nicely so better last step in we're just going to work on these walls coming up to get this top door in and then cob it we got the door frame for the outer door so sugi bond [Music] had the work wares doing that they're getting it all oiled up and yeah cranking right along got the door frame in for the upper part so now you guys can kind of see how it's uh going to turn out we have these hoops that go up across here taper all the way down to the ground um barbed wire or not barbed wire fencing materials and then cob over that we're going to basically do three courses up and then do lop off half a bag and then basically lose half a bag for every three courses so these courses will start getting shorter and shorter and shorter as we create this little dome going down [Music] came out here to play just a little bit uh so instead of doing just straight cob on the outside um started liking the idea of doing some stone work because we have so many rocks so playing with this this is just a natural cob mortar stone uh combination so it's one part cob one part sand i'm gonna play with that mixture a little bit to see if i can get it kind of a little more sticky and then just kind of stack it up and get the right rocks in the right place so um if this actually works i think we're gonna be doing this quite a bit around the property girls have been cranking the last several days and got us up to just about bags being finished so we've got approximately 10 bags to go just one more row here and then across the top and really excited like this is probably close to 1400 bags hand filled and stacked each one weighing somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds [Music] we got in the framing so all of this metal in you can finally kind of see how it's going to look in the end my project this afternoon is to finish getting the cage on um it's mostly there and then basically what we're doing as you can see it's getting burlap and all that's doing really is to keep the cop from falling through the vents once it hardens and everything i'm not worried about it [Music] we are just about done with the cobbing and the work order has been killing it the last couple weeks really that this has been going on uh their project right now is um we're filling in kind of smoothing out with cobb this little dome issue that we had last summer with our root cellar was it was getting too warm period in like the mid to upper 70s which is not ideal we needed more insulation on the roof basically our structure wasn't strong enough for a lot a lot of weight and a lot a lot of dirt to really get a good mound that you would want to keep it or like a cave but when he all commented which i appreciate and suggested so what we did was it was time for our composting toilet way back there somewhere the old piles the ones that are one and two years old to get broken down and distributed so basically our bin is eight straw bales so we took those 16 straw bales put them broke them apart put them on top and then just covered it with a light layer of dirt so that the straw won't all blow away should add like a good four to six inches of insulation plus the additional three inches i'm confident this is going to be a lot more regulated than it was last year working on the plaster here on the outside it's actually quite enjoyable um these batches go pretty far so one big batch here we'll do like that just got the second batch on i'm just gonna crank on this as long as i can today um show you guys kind of how this is put together this is some sand that we just kind of get from the wash go through pull out some of the rocks and stuff um clean it up so i do one part or sorry two-part sand [Music] to a lime so this is just a lime type s hydrated lime um about 12 bucks a bag pretty cheap and they seem to go i think probably three or four or maybe five batches per bag which is good um a little over one part lime to two parts sand seems to be working uh we throw some straw in there to give it some binder and then just kind of mix it all up throw it up on the wall [Music] once we get this coat done um this is the scratch coat so it's still pretty rough uh we'll get a little bit looser coat that'll smooth out easier and get a coat of paint time call this thing done [Music] [Music] so why did we build this this was a lot of work a lot of man hours a lot a lot of bags but it was really important as our first project for this community because we needed a controlled environment to store food for a large group of people so through our eco residency program we'll have anywhere between 5 and 15 people out here that's a lot of mouths to feed and again if it's 105 degrees outside that's not a great place to store produce and things like that we are also on solar so our solar system is very very limited out here so we could not afford to keep a air-conditioned room we have no air conditioning out here at all a few stats on this because i know a lot of people are curious about this what did it cost all of our man hours all of our time is all volunteer labor through our eco residency program so material cost is really the only expense that we have in total our material cost was around two thousand dollars very very inexpensive that was a couple hundred bucks for the excavation probably about a thousand dollars for the bags another couple hundred bucks in barbed wire a lot of the stuff that we used on this build came directly from the land our labor costs if you were to pay somebody to do this is high and i think that's why a lot of people don't do this sort of build because this was around nine months of bag work we worked a couple times a week a lot on the weekends that sort of deal how it functions the highest i've seen the temperature get in there is about 75 degrees and the lowest i've seen it get is about 50. since we started posting this series you all have had a lot of questions i just want to put it out there i am happy to answer any questions that you guys have about this project or any other project just leave a comment below i look and read every one of them i respond to as many as possible i'm happy to get your feedback i don't claim to know everything and so if you all have a better way of doing this certainly let me know add it in the comments below some of the questions i've been getting on this i think the biggest one is what about rain does it leak no it doesn't we've been through two monsoon seasons with this and have not had a drop of water in this building the second question i get is is it humid down there how do you manage you know mold and things like that we have vent pipes so we have two vent pipes on the front and two vent pipes on the back the two on the front go all the way down to the ground the two on the back stick out from the top what this does is cold air sinks hot air rises we have air circulating through here passively with no electricity that helps keep mold issues away so i want to go through some of the challenges some of the learning some of what we screwed up i think the first thing and the biggest thing that i've mentioned a handful of times in our comments and things like that is i would never ever ever do or recommend individual bag building ever again there is systems that i wasn't familiar with when we started this project that i feel are vastly superior not necessarily in a structural sense but more in a how to build and time and labor and energy expended to build this so since this build we have switched to a system called hyper adobe it's these big long red bag tubes that you know you just kind of mix and fill up and go you know in one continuous bag i feel after doing hyper adobe and after doing earth bag that hyperadobe is vastly superior because you're going in continuous bags so you're not having to lift individual bags the other advantage to hyper adobe over individual earth bag you have a continuous form with these the earth bags are held together with barbed wire whereas the hyper adobe is one solid piece because each layer melds into the layer below it and above it another thing that we would have done differently is to dig deeper so we dug at about 10 feet deep and that gives us about an eight foot ceiling but what happened is basically we couldn't pile a lot of dirt on top there's only maybe two inches of dirt on top of this root cellar if i were to do it differently i would have had them dig another foot or two down so that way we can get more insulation get a better temperature regulation down there that's more consistent another learning that we had on this was our systems our systems while we were building this were terrible our sifting system was a table that you had to basically put the dirt on and then hand sift since then we've switched to essentially a screen that's sloped on a frame that you can just throw the dirt into it's so much easier it goes i mean literally like 10 times faster than how we sifted all the dirt for this the other thing is a cement mixer as you sift the dirt you then have to wet the dirt so that way it compacts and forms into bricks i just i don't know why i don't know why we didn't buy the cement mixer but since i've actually gotten two cement mixers for hyper adobe and that just saves so much time and energy because hand mixing is really really difficult one thing that i think i would have done differently on this build is to put in more cleats that's one thing that we put in some but i think you can't have enough cleats in the walls and what that is is basically a two by four 2x4 with some nails sticking out of it that is stuck into the wall that you can actually screw into [Music] i want to go through some of the pros honestly i love this root cellar it is such a great functional piece on this property we use it all the time every day people are going in and out of there getting food and stuff it keeps things really nice and controlled so i would absolutely absolutely recommend this to any homesteader they're amazing we don't have to use electricity i don't have to worry about things going out i know it's going to be controlled and one thing that's really really nice is we've only had one mouse in here in almost two years that we've been using it um that can't be said about any other structure on this property because they get into everywhere i think i really enjoy the stairs on this i know a lot of people do root cellars with ladders to me that seems difficult it seems like something where you're having to carry boxes of food up and down so we took some extra time we took a lot of extra labor to build this little kind of dome walkway thing going down into it but i'm really really happy we did that the other thing i really like about this is the sustainability of it we did use woven bags that are plastic but those bags once they're covered will last hundreds and hundreds of years most of this build the majority 95 of it is all just dirt that was excavated from the land so we're building with stuff that's local we're building with stuff that we got for free i am confident that this build will last several hundred years with all of that information let me take you guys on a tour of our root cellar so starting off we have our little walkway down what i really love about this is it looks like a boot i like the mood this wasn't intentional it just kind of happened this is our our boot cellar and so it's kind of funny because this is the first thing you see when you come onto the property it looks very inconspicuous i have a lot of people think it's the toilet or like a weird garden shed or something like that what i love about that is like it doesn't look like much from the ground level but what you don't realize is there's a whole room underneath the earth alright coming down we have our entryway this here is a piece of art that i am working on the story behind this is we had a virus that came through while we were building this that killed off a lot of the rabbits in the area found one called the wildlife service basically they said to bury it as deep as you can so that no animals gets it and it's to help stop the spread of that virus flopsy was a little rabbit that we saw every morning that played in the wood pile outside of our bedroom window and he died and so this is an homage to flopsy it was buried in the root cellar because we had a 10-foot hole that we were backfilling and so we buried him as deep as we could to keep the virus in hands let's come into the cellar so this is our cellar uh it is about 10 foot by 10 foot square that's about as big as you want to go with a square structure the reason i went with square instead of round round is always going to be stronger and better and you can do bigger but round is also really hard to put shelves in and so you lose a lot of space that way so that's why we did square on this build so going through a couple of cool features of this place we did put electricity down here so this is all run off of solar it was really important to one just be able to have lights down here we're down underground so having lights is nice but also i brew beer and so i wanted to have a kegerator down here i wanted to have a refrigerator down here very basic setup few outlets on the wall a little breaker box and some lights that's all we really needed down here but that is a big big deal one thing that we thought about doing was some grow lights down here so maybe being able to grow some vegetables in a place that again is temperature controlled and away from the pests and bugs up to this point we haven't done that just because again everything out here is a work in progress but that's something that we may do in the future is be able to actually set up a couple shelves out here to do some micro greens or something like that as far as our finish out on this we went very very simple as you can see i kept the bags exposed that is totally okay as long as they stay out of the light which they do 99 [Music] we also have our lights on a timer uh people forget to shut the light off so that's what that is show you guys a couple of cool things we have down here we have a kegerator so i used to brew beer um i would love to get back into it once we get water security out here because brewing beer takes a ton of ton of water and i can't quite justify it right now but we have this kegerator down here right now we are using it as a refrigerator one thing that's really cool about using a deep freeze as a refrigerator is they take a lot less electricity they're a lot better insulated a couple things we did to convert this freezer into a refrigerator is we got this thing you plug this in to your wall and then plug your refrigerator freezer into here set your temperature we're at 38 degrees right now and basically this will kick off once it gets to 38 degrees so your freezer is not running as often and will not use as much electricity the other thing i do on all of my refrigerators out here is set them on a timer this timer kicks on uh basically at 8 00 a.m and shuts off at 8 p.m at night we're not opening and closing this we are a vegetarian community out here so a lot of our food you know if it sits overnight it's not like meat that's gonna rot or anything like that so by having this our refrigerator is only on during good daylight hours if you're not accessing it these freezers will stay cold for a really really long time as far as our storage in here these are all just very basic garage shelves i really like having the wire racks for our produce it just gets a little more airflow in there and stuff rots less frequently i mentioned our ceiling um this is all tongue and groove three quarter inch plywood we have a low voc sealer on the bottom and then we actually use used motor oil on the top to help seal everything up all of this is scrap steel i want to show you guys our vents so this is a three inch vent pipe abs plastic pipe that goes through the wall straight up and then we also have two hot vents coming out here for our floor this is very very very simple all this is is pea gravel we put about two feet down and that's it that's our floor so if we do get water in here it's gonna basically act like a french drain system go down into the earth i'm going to touch on these cleats so you can see these pieces of wood sticking out of the wall what this is is a piece of plywood nails going up nails going down and then a two by four attached what this does is let us attach things to the wall so this is another look at our vent pipes this helps keep mold and stuff like that from becoming an issue moisture from becoming an issue if you see these two are our cool pipes so they go down all the way to the bottom of the cellar and then on this side we have our two hot pipes so those are at the top of the cellar the way we've oriented these is these two are facing south and the reason is our driving winds shoot this way so we'll get a little bit more wind pushing down into there and then these two are pointed out that way and so that way um the hot air can just naturally rise out it's not being forced into the cellar we also put screening material and hardware cloth over all of these pipes and that's just to keep the bugs and keep the mice out thank you guys for watching i hope this build was inspirational to you i hope it answered some questions i hope you learned a little bit if you found this interesting please consider a subscription those subscriptions that little click of a button goes a long way to help out our channel let us create these videos for you guys teach people how to live more sustainably if you have any questions about this build or about off-grid living sustainable living natural building things like that leave a comment i read every single one of them i respond to as many as possible thank you guys for watching go build something cool [Music] you

Channel: Off-Grid Upcycled Desert Homestead

Views: 130,530

Keywords: Homestead, Off-grid, DIY, Building, Natural Building, Desert Living, Sustainable Building, Sustainablity, Homestead Life, non-profit, Charity, Building education, Education

Id: TY2AeGcQEtg

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022