Construction Begins on our MASSIVE Earthbag Wall

This week on OSRL we begin construction of the final wall of our house. This wall will be made with earth bags and it seems like it's going to be particularly challenging. All right how's it going everyone and welcome back to the channel. Now if you're new here my wife and I are building our own home off-grid here in the Arizona desert but if you caught our last video what were we doing on our last video? We were getting ready to build our final wall. And now we are going to start building. So we got those forms ready we're about ready to put those forms up start doing the barbed wire and start building this wall. So how are you feeling? You weren't feeling too good during the last video you had problems with your legs with the nerves. Yeah I've been doing some stretching and I feel a lot better. And you feel like you can out be out here doing the hard work is it going to be a lot of hard work? Yeah I mean I guess I don't know until I do it. You don't know until you do it. I guess we should try doing it then. All right let's all start uncovering those bags then put up the forms and we'll start laying that barbed wire. All right we're all uncovered exposing the bags to all the harmful UV light. All right let's get these forms in place. We built these forms which will create a space for our doorways. These are temporary structures that will be removed after the wall is complete. The type we built is called a mineshaft style door form. The sides of the form create a flat surface for the bags to be laid against and are slightly wider than the bags so the bags won't wrap around the form. All right so we got those forms up and today we're going to start laying bags. Jess will be out here in a little bit she's going to do barbed wire but in the meantime I'm going to get over there I'm going to start prepping some of the dirt get it all shoveled into the carts get it all wet so it's ready to go and then uh time to start laying bags y'all. Very exciting. All right good morning. Now I just want to give a shout out to this lady here she didn't get much sleep last night a few hours only but she's out here ready to throw some barbed wire. You ready? This is all you but I already got dirt ready see oh UV's gonna eat the dirt. Are you sure you want to be doing this today? It's dangerous on eight hours of sleep I don't know about three hours of sleep. You want me to get you some goggles? Maybe. Actually probably not a bad idea in general right? I think I want some sunglasses at least. Barbed wire is an important part of the earth bag building process. It acts as a velcro mortar sticking rows of bags together. It also adds tensile strength to the wall. All right y'all barbed wire is all laid dirt's still ready to go just ready to go we're ready to do bags. How you feeling? Doing okay running on three hours of sleep? Usually when building with earth bags we use bag stands to hold the bags upright and open making it easier to quickly dump dirt into them. This time we found that the opening of these bags were a little too small for the stand actually making it harder to add the dirt. We opted to not use any stand instead Jim helped me get the first bit of dirt into the bag and the dirt itself created a stable base. Then I rolled the bag down a bit to firm up the top and help it stay open on its own. Yeah yeah yeah yeah you don't want to smash it up against the panels. Are you satisfied? You don't seem like you trust that first bag. It sets the standard. It does set the standard yeah. It's the one that's got to be perfect. You look centered. Are you centered? You need balance Jess. We've been watching a lot of Karate Kid. You know while we're out here busting our butts Yuvia's inside taking a nap. How much do you want to be taking a nap right now? More than you. She said uh she said she'll take a nap for you. That's very kind. Do you feel the rest entering into your body? Ugh you eating that dirt? You're nasty. All right so it's getting late in the day and man we are both getting exhausted and we're not even done with the first course yet. We're just going to have to kind of finish off this middle section and we're going to have to try and finish the rest off tomorrow. But this first course is definitely going to be one of the more difficult ones because we're going to be adding buttresses to this other door. So a lot more work yet to come. So how does it feel to be back doing earth bags? I'll say I don't really miss it too much. I think it's a cool kind of interesting way of building. Yeah yeah. But it is very labor intensive and I feel like every year that goes by it gets a little harder for us to do that. I'm glad we're doing this at the age we are. I don't think the two of us maybe a decade down the line could knock out as many bags as we're doing but uh and that still it's a challenge. But I like that you know pretty simple as far as the materials and just using the dirt we have here. Luckily the type of soil we have here is great for this type of work. Absolutely perfect yep. And we still have bags left over from our previous earth bag projects. That's why we're still using the single bags. You know we could be playing around with super adobe, hyper adobe, but we still have a lot of bags so we definitely want to use some of these up. We definitely don't want those to go to waste. I mean these were going to get thrown out previously but luckily we're able to rescue them at a very low cost to us and it's been a perfect to build with. It is challenging, don't get me wrong, building these using these single bags. You know it's just uh you know filling each bag individually using the barbed wire but for us the price was right. We're using those bags make sure they don't go to waste. I think that's something that makes me feel good about using this as well and doing this particular type of technique because we were able to kind of upcycle these bags and put them to a permanent use in our house. Last bag of the day. Nice. You got the weirdest places to lay down, you know that? One of Jim's jobs in building this wall is preparing and delivering the dirt that I will then use to fill the bags. He shovels our clay-rich subsoil into a cart, removes the large rocks, and adds water to moisten it. He then wheels the heavy cart or wheelbarrow over to the work site. One cart only fills about two to three bags and then he has to get more dirt again. You've you laying your head right on them rocks? That can't be comfortable. Well there's some straw there too. A little bit of hard, a little bit of soft. Not that straw is particularly soft and does get kind of pokey. It's fluffy but it's pokey. All right this is the next day. Bright and early. Well not super early but definitely bright. And we still got to finish the first course. Oh my goodness we couldn't get it done yesterday. But no retreat, no surrender. We're gonna we're gonna knock out the rest of this first course. Of course we still got to add those buttresses so it's gonna be a little complicated. But uh how are you feeling today? Um it's hard to say right now but so far. So far I feel okay. All right I'll take it. Did you get good sleep? I don't know if it was good but it was better than the night before. That's gonna have to do. All right let's get it done. Oh you you ready to get it done? You ready to get it done? Sometimes with earthbag construction buttresses are needed. We're adding buttresses to our build to add some lateral support to the wall. In the case of our design we probably don't actually need the buttresses as our wall has a significant curve to it. We also have a long intersecting wall in the middle. All these things add lateral support. But we wanted to add buttresses on each side of the doors just to be safe as door openings tend to be the weakest part of the wall. So some people have been asking us why start with the earthbags we still gotta finish putting the roof on and a couple of things. One it is pretty windy out here so I'm not quite sure if I'm comfortable hauling panels up there to put them on top of the roof. But the second thing is we are still in some of the cooler months so this like I said this work is really labor intensive. So if we can get this done during the cooler months that's going to be a lot better for us than trying to pound these bags during the hot sweaty summer months. So I'd rather be pounding bags in the cooler weather and then maybe having to do the roof when it's warmer. So that's the big reason for that. All right so we got our first course of the new wall done. I mean there's a couple courses beneath this but that's the foundation course. I'm calling this one course one. I estimated we have about 14 courses that we have to do to finish this wall which is a decent amount. I was thinking that maybe this wouldn't be too bad but it is a pretty decent sized wall. It's a pretty big wall. It is the same size as the dome. Of course the dome is a full circle but you're looking at a 20 foot diameter here so it is quite a bit of bags that we got to lay. Although we're only going about approximately six feet high so it's not shouldn't be too bad but it is still going to be a lot of work. How do you feel about this whole thing? Course number one done. The last wall. It seems like more than I thought it would be. I think I brought it up before but it's still like half the full circumference of the dome. Yeah. Of course it's not going to be anywhere near as high but that's still like a 20 foot diameter. We have that the dividing wall in the middle and that's 10 feet long and then we have four buttresses and each one of those is three feet long so that's another 12 feet so it's it adds up it's actually quite a bit. So each of these courses are still going to be quite labor intensive to kind of put out but we are using smaller bags so it doesn't take quite as much dirt to fill each bag so that's the bright side but I still I'm still estimating maybe about 13 more courses to possibly finish this off so it's going to be a lot. Good morning. Well I don't know if you can tell but it's a little soggy out here. We got some rain. In the early morning hours we got a good tenth of an inch of rain. Not not a ton of rain but it is enough to get things nice and soggy out here so because we're not in the summer months we're not even in the spring yet it's going to take a while for this to dry out and it's just going to be way too difficult to push any carts especially around those areas where I've been moving dirt. It's just going to be really soggy those carts are just going to get loaded up with dirt around the wheels but that's okay we got to make a trip into town so this is a perfect opportunity to do that. We're going to load Yuvie up in the Tahoe and take a little trip. All right we're headed up we're making our first stop. Jess is getting out. Yuvie is not happy she wants to jump out and explore. So even though with that rain delay I'm not at all disappointed. It was nice taking a little family trip getting Yuvie out there. We had to take care of a couple of things and then I did kind of splurge on myself a little bit and got a new wheelbarrow. The one I've been using that the wheels getting all cockeyed and I might have to kind of work with it and see if I can get that fixed up. All right we're at the home away from home and Yuvie wants out she's ready for this trip to end. I did get a brand new wheelbarrow I think this will be perfect. We got to move a lot of dirt here very shortly filling these bags so I really wanted something that I could haul that dirt around here with that's not going to you know cause any injury and I thought that was kind of worth it. So with this wheelbarrow and the gorilla cart I think those are going to be absolutely invaluable out here because I'm just going to need so much. Now I'll be kind of applying some cob protect those bags going a little straw heavy on this cob to make it a little bit more rain resistant but that should protect some of these bags especially these lower foundation bags that have been sitting there for a while. They could already be experiencing some degradation so we want to make sure that they don't degrade any further. Make sure they're well protected. Oh course number one is done. Man that was some course too. Of course the course was a little bit bigger than we had intended. We had to build those extra buttresses so it took a little bit more time this time but what a cool accomplishment. Thanks so much for joining us. Man I'm so excited. Course number one done and we're just going to build up from here so 13 more to go approximately. Let's have a countdown and let's knock this out. You ready to knock this out? Let's do it. All right y'all we'll catch you in the next video. Don't forget to give this video a big thumbs up for building with earth bags again and we'll catch you in the next video. Bye.