Building an Earth-Sheltered Home: Part II

Check-out the second entry in an ongoing series helping folks design and implement the infrastructure for an earth-sheltered home.

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PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
The low-cost, earth-sheltered home near completion.

Is it possible to achieve food and energy independence on one acre? Well, with imagination, hard work, and the right one acre, we think it might be done . . . and that’s what this project is all about. Of course, providing most of the basic needs for four people from such a small piece of ground is a tall order. Still, we think it’s a goal worth pursuing, and we hope that in this series of articles about our low-cost homestead we’ll be able to help some of you in your struggles to increase your self-reliance . . . by doing some of the experimenting for you.

In our first installment, we discussed our plans for this project–which include our round, earth-sheltered home . . . an independent, low-voltage DC electrical system run from hydropower . . . and permaculture agricultural schemes–and described the construction methods used to raise the circular building’s block walls. This time, we’ll go into the intricacies of framing the energy-efficient home. (For readers unfamiliar with construction jargon, see the Passive Solar and Earth Sheltered Home Building Glossary.) If you’d like to purchase the earth-sheltered home blueprint, you can find it in the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store.

On most construction projects, it’s a real milestone when you get to the point where you can have a sheltered work-and-storage area . . . particularly when you’re working through the winter (as we were!). Yet before we could get a roof overhead, we had to begin the framing of the round earth-sheltered house by erecting the full-diameter, east-west partition. Because all of our building’s rafters bear on this wall, its completion was the key to getting to work on the roof structure. And though the wall is a fairly standard 2 X 4, 16″ on-center partition-with openings left for the bedroom and bath doors-the job is complicated somewhat by the special reinforcement above the door headers and the 1-in-12 pitch of the top plates. Consequently, it’s a good place to “get one’s feet wet” with unsquare framing . . . and to learn some of the skills that will be important to the successful completion of this admittedly complicated stage of our house’s construction.

Because the west top plate overhangs the exterior block wall, the main partition can’t be framed on the floor and lifted into position, as is often done. Instead, we found it best to start by securing the sole plates to the concrete slab with expansion anchors or a nail gun, so that their centerline bisected the circle of the building. This left the north side of the east sole plate flush with the north side of the pilaster on the bermed wall.

  • Published on Jan 1, 1984
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