Dedicated Project Visits Continued
William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay. William is not a novice to creative...
Lifetime Design Buildings at Forty Three Cents Per Square Foot
We have demonstrated $4/sq. ft. costs for lifetime building in the last post – based on using on-site earth as a low cost building material. When our CEB machine is optimized to 3000 bricks per day, this option becomes really attractive as a viable...
The Brick that Broke the Camel’s Back
I have a lot to say about where I am, about what I’m doing, about what I’m feeling and about bricks. And no pictures to say it with. So, please be persistent and listen to what I have to say and perhaps we’ll all be the wiser for it....
3000 Bricks and Counting
Upon the suggestion of Reto Stauss of the nachhaltigBeobachtet blog, we have installed the ChipIn widget here for additional transparency in our crowd funding strategy. At the time of this post, we collected $1144, and still have $856 left to go in the...
CEB Foundation and Trusses Complete
from 2008. We have finished laying gravel and insulation for the CEB addition foundation. It is a shallow insulated foundation, made with 2″ extruded polystyrene insulation going down 18 inches, plus 1 inch gravel as the fill. There is a drainage...
October Progress Report: Major Success in Crowd Funding
Thank you to all the people that supported us for the month of October – our transition to support via crowd funding. The October funding and corresponding progress were a major success. Here is the progress report. Overview: We are on our way to...
Factor e Farm Winter CEB Convergence – This Weekend
People, we are getting into major CEB construction. Today we are building trusses for the roof. It will we an workshop addition to the greenhouse, featuring living roof, CEB walls, shallow insulated foundation, masonry stove, plus sauna running off the...
Earth Plaster
Hi, this is Travis. My cousin, Ben, and I had a last minute opportunity to visit Factor E Farm. Ben has been helping with the open source Solar Turbine project and I am trying to get the earth plaster operation started. Last month I had the fortune of...
Oh Well
We have not been blogging much lately, because spring is here and we’re on the land. When spring hits, the sparks start flying with action outside. We’re building Sanctuary, aka Factor e Farm. The last week we’ve been drilling our well...
Assessment
How much is a twenty-foot diameter building worth…made of earthbags? Does it increase the property value or decrease it? When we first built our earthbag structure (locally known as the “mud hut”), the very small neighbouring town was...
