Construction

\Having a truly comfortable, safe and beautiful home is gonna be the key to a happy off grid life !

So here’s what your house could look like.

Have you ever experienced the feeling of living in a place that’s not just made of concrete?

Natural materials have something special they outdo cement on many points, they can have better seismic resistance, better humidity regulation, temperature regulation, they can be cheaper and locally sourced.

It's a matter of taste, but better aesthetic style as well, while being much more eco-friendly than cement.

And some people even claim that it is healthier to live in a natural material house.

And another big plus is that if you're using local material you could build in a much more remote location without needing to build a big enough road for a big truck to deliver you, you'll just need a trail good enough for a 4x4.

This is an overview of the off grid building thematic covering, designs, natural material, merging them with modern materials, comfort hacks and more.

So let's get in the subject,

Whatever material you choose, The goal is to build a house that will take care of you, using minimal ressource,staying comfy all year round and easy to maintain.

It s often interesting to have the house partially burried to benefits from earth thermal mass, Oriented to maximize sun light throughout the year, embedding a greenhouse inside the house, packed with a bunch of appropriate technologies fully autonomous or at least trying to….

That is the concept of an Earth Ship, the design and material choices, may depend on your climate, and local ressources…

So let’s dive into it !

Let’s first see all the techniques related to building with earth.

Earth bag technique,

it has many advantages in my opinion. Cheap to build, great Seismic resistance, a good humidity regulation, bullet proof, fireproof and long lasting.

It's built by packing earth in a bag and laying layers onto layers, a little bit like a human 3d printer… you will need either many bags or better a long continuous bag, Barbwire to interlock the layers is advised.

There is two main variation in the design either you’re building kind of an earth igloo, which is interesting because you’ll need less roofing it’s stronger, but it needs to be very well done, even making calcultions, to make sure it wont collapse.

Other wise just make the walls and put roof on it, you want to make round walls So that the structure hold itself and it will be much stronger than straight walls, if you really want straight walls youll need some reinforcement, such as those

It's a very labour intensive construction, when the main job is finished and you want to make it look prettier you can slap some kind of a natural plaster in and outside to give a nicer result.

Keep those plaster finishes in mind as they apply to a pretty much all earth based walls.

Next Rammed earth,

Making walls with compacted earth, strong, beautifull, long lasting if protected from the rain.

You’ll need to make wooden frames in which you pour the Earth and then compact it, then move that frame and repeat the process again and again and again.

It could be compacted by hand or the process can be speed up with machines.

It'ss advised to start the walls on a cement base to insulate the walls from the earth's humidity.

It can give beautiful results, especially when different types of soils are mixed…

It takes some trials and error to achieve nice results, As it will depend on the soil ratio of sand, clay, the humidity the day you are doing it and other factors…

By the way, rammed earth can also be used to make your floor, once the earth is properly compressed apply some sealant material such as linsey oil to make it waterproof. Polish and reapply another coat a few times, it gives a beautiful, warm and very comfy result.

Otherwise you could go more conventional and make your own bricks.

With adobe for exemple, a mix of clay, sand, water, and often organic fibers like straw to bind everything together. Those bricks are simply dried in the sun, it offers excellent thermal mass, natural insulation, and durability in arid climates, but it needs to be well protected from the rain.

Or In the same concept there is also Earth compacted blocks,

The blocks, bricks, are compressed so much more densely, stronger, and more resistant than adobe.

Obviously as they are compacted you ll need much more earth for building the same wall…

Another one is the Cob house, mud house, great if the soil has a lot of clay, mixing the clay with straw and some water, making big soft bricks stacking them on top of each other, smoothening the walls, even sculpting the walls if you wish.

Instead of making the whole house out of Cob, you could also apply the cob on to another material >

> Watt and daub,

Very ancient technique of weaving Woodstick, or bamboo, to make a fence and then applying mud onto it, It’s pretty fast to build not a great insulation though…

> Or Straw and bale,

Here the idea is to make a timber structural frame, making the walls with straw bale, and closing it all up with mud, and finally some natural plaster on top.

Great insulation property, cheap material, disadvantages are that you might have animals living in your walls… it also wouldn’t do great in the event of a fire…

Now much stronger, you could go with Rocks too,

If you have lots of them on your property, it might be a great material choice for your home. Humans have been building with rocks forever, it’s keeping a cozy temperature inside, and can be pretty good seismically if very well made. And that’s the problem. It’s not really DIY friendly material. It’s a real art to master it and can be a painful and heavy process.

Similar to rocks but slightly out of the box option, how about a Cave house?

It has a james bond villain vibe to it, but why not? It could be fairly simple, such as closing up the cave with glass or any other construction methods we are seeing here, but humidity might be a problem, and you'd also better have a seismic analysis of it to make sure the structure is safe.

Similar to the cave, there's also buried houses.

It will have an extremely stable temperature throughout the year, might lack some luminosity and eventual trouble with humidity, be really careful to build them somewhere That’s not gonna flood obviously.

Here, just like all the other construction types, depending on your budget, skills and work you want to put in you could end up with a rat hole or a mansion…

It could be semi buried, or just having a vegetal roof like the ancient greenland style turf houses.

For all those burried type constructiuons you might be concerned by the lack of natural light, just know solutions exists, such as this device that catches sunlight and make it travel through optical fibers bringing natural light inside.

Next section, Building with wood

Wood cabins are simply beautiful, warm and very cozy, you'll need a chainsaw, nails, and hammer, could be in a Canadian style or a much more open type structure, Or one of the thousand other designs you can see around the world.

Wood rots if kept wet, so thats when cement comes in real handy to keep the feet of the house dry.

Bamboo it’s a wonderful material but it needs to be treated properly in the first place, and then it can last for decades, many decades in some cases.

Treating it could be as simple as soaking it for 2 to 3 months in seawater, or one of the many other techniques available. It’s light, super strong. It's a plentiful material as it grows so quickly, capturing tons of carbon at the same time, it’s relatively easy to work with and simply beautiful to look at, as you can see here.

And Fun fact, To efficiently build a big structure with bamboo, you should make a little maquette out of tiny bamboo stick, and then choose in real life which bamboo pole is most similar to the stick used in the maquette, Bamboo strength is impressive.

Next up lets see a bunch of unconventional designs,

How about a treehouse?

It's a beautiful experience to be living in a tree, we are monkeys after all… there are many ways to do it, the best is to choose methods that are the least hurtful for the tree, and that will adapt to the growth of the tree.

I built one in Costa Rica and lived in it for a year and a half. It was amazing being in the heart of the jungle having a nice point of view of what’s going on down there, observing animals for hours, I loved it… and bonus if you go high enough there are much less mosquitos.

Continuing with other unconventional housing type, we have the yurt, a pretty ancient housing type used by nomadic tribes, it’s pretty cozy in there, you’ll appreciate the round space, it might be interesting, especially if you are bothered by legislation to build on your land. Similar to Yurth you have fancy tents options.

Now let's talk about Cement and its derivatives, it can be handy to make your fondations, keeping your walls insulated from the ground to have something more long lasting and eventually your floors as well,

Or you could build with ferrocement, projecting cement on a metal structure, ferrocement is a technique used to build boat hulls as well. So it will allow you to make oddly shaped constructions, people often do that with concrete but you could make it more eco friendly by using aircrete, pretty much simply air injected in regular concrete. So the bubbles make you use less concrete… In the same vibe, there’s paperCrete, and yeah you guessed it right, it’s about mixing paper with concrete…hempcrete, or many others are options as well.

Container houses, they allow a modern design, pretty strong, maybe you want to consider insulating them though…

if you live very remote the trouble is to get the containers to your place…

Geodesic dome, pretty stylish, can be made with different materials like glass or plastic.

Recycled plastic brick, a way to tackle plastic pollution problems, melting trash and casting them into lego bricks. The down side is obviously about living in plastic house…

Igloo, if you live somewhere really cold and don't believe in climate change….

Now last I have a very high tech construction method to propose to you, how about a 3D printed house? it’s gonna be a revolutionary construction Technique, Very little labor needed, Opening new design possibilities, i’m especially interested in the possibility of printing the house out of clay and not cement, it needs quite a lot of trial and error but, finding the perfect clay mix that’s gonna work, but it’s possible, look at those

Well, I hope it was interesting to you. I’ll come back with individual video on each type of construction material technique. If you’re interested please let me know about which one first ! like share subscribe! You know the drill…

Keep the Mogo keep building your oasis