Eco-Build Workshop Challenge Days 1-3. "Build a Tiny Earthship in 2 weeks on a $3,000 budget with 30 unskilled volunteers!"

The start of this workshop had my adrenaline pumping and all my skills tested. Whilst I had done my best to make sure we had everything we needed to begin, this was not the case when I arrived. They still hadn't got enough tyres, and there had been no work performed to do some levelling of the small area where we would build. Luckily I arrived a few days before the volunteers to try to make sure I had time to organise things. I was assured the tyres were on the way, and that they were the right size. I had a good look at the plot with Joan and we had a few long chats whilst staring at the empty space, soon to become a small and hopefully beautiful mini Earthship.

Joan was so excited to see something like this happening on her land. For at least 10 years she has been stressed out and frustrated at the process of building normal concrete houses with the local labour. Everything costed a lot of money, and took much longer than she was expecting. These expensive concrete houses didn't even look that nice, and were just the same old ugly square box type structure. I could feel her enthusiasm, but I could also sense she was quite tense. After some more chatting I learned that Joan didn't have any money left, and that even $3,000 was more than she could really afford. If things went over budget then we would be in trouble! I tried to assure her that it would be OK, and made sure of it by promising to` make it work from my own money if needed.

This build was clearly a project that was for the greater good, and that is what kept my mood and enthusiasm high for the whole 2 week project. I was spending quite a lot of money subsidising this, and several surprises cropped up that I just dealt with by throwing money at. I bought a lovely projector and screen whilst I was in Bangalore on my way to Puttaparthy. The magic of the Internet and India hooked me up with a good LED projector that I could also use at home and on solar power since it used very little electricity (50 Watts). I spent around $1,200 on that and the screen, a good sturdy one like we used to have at school. I was going to be giving a full day of lectures, twice, and I really wanted to have a solid presentation. Normally I am petrified of public speaking, but for some reason I seem to be able to babble on about Earthships all day long without any trouble. I had prepared a pretty thorough 8 hour lecture that covered just about everything that I felt people needed to know in order to understand what an Earthship is, how they work, why they work, and the basics about how to build them.

The day came that everyone arrived, and I spent most of it hanging around the hotel and knocking on doors to meet who had come. People seemed really excited, and had come from all over the world to be able to join in. I had so many roles to play, and I enjoyed playing them all.. except for one! As I mentioned last time, we were in a place called Puttaparthy, in India. This is a small village that is based entirely around the Ashram of Sai Baba. People have to behave very modestly are supposed to be quiet and not disturb others.. especially at night. There is no alcohol, meat, or partying going on.. People wake up at 4am and go to sleep at 10pm. So, I knocked on door of one of the new arrivals, and it opened up to reveal 5 people all smoking it up! Rather than look at all uncomfortable that I had found them getting stoned on our first meeting, they all invited me in to join them. Oh dear! I mean, I am a smoker.. but I had to have my 'Teachers Hat' on because they would get thrown out for this! I went in and did my best to explain where we were and what the rules were. I knew they got it, and also knew they would keep smoking. You can just tell! By 4pm time I had met almost all of the volunteers. They were really nice and I was happy that I had put them all in once hotel even if it costed more.

Day 1

This hotel also had a large meeting room, and day one of the workshop was spent entirely in this room whilst I attempted to upload my whole Earthship mindset to them. I arrived bright and early to set things up and check people were all awake. Everything looked in order, and I even had a couple of extra people turn up that I wasn't expecting. I got my projector working, and everyone sat on cushions on the floor. We could just about darken the room enough to get a good view of the projector screen, and before I knew it I was into to the lecture. I started with a science class to explain the total basics about things like convection, conduction, molecules, and all the principles you need to know in order to understand how an Earthship actually works. I wasn't sure if I would be looking at blank faces all day, or if I would be able to hold everyone;s attention all day long. I think it went pretty well, and almost no one left before the day was out.

I think it was a great idea to do this one day lecture, even though I wasn't 100% sure about it before hand. If nothing else, people were itching to get their hands dirty after a long journey and the whole day learning theory. By the end of the day they were all initiated into the realm of Earthship Biotecture, and I felt proud to have been able to give them that gift. I wish we had video taped it! ;-)

I left that evening giving very clear instructions to all the volunteers and hotel staff that they should arrive on site with Rickshaws at 9am. I slept well that night, and had a very early start and a big day ahead!

Day 2

I got up super early, and was too excited to do anything else but check out the site and see how the work on leveling and preparation had gone on. I was staying in Ananda Farm with my partner @clara-andriessen, and it was just a 5 minute walk through a beautiful landscaped gardens to reach it. The tyres were left to the absolute last minute and I discovered a huge pile of them near the entrance. Only an Earthship builder will know this particular type of joy, of seeing a huge pile of perfectly sized old car tyres. I can't remember for sure, but im guessing I hugged a few of them. During the tyre ramming process, we put SO much good energy into these tyres and the dirt, that I have no concerns about the energetics of using tyres as a building material.

I walked on and reached the site. It looked exactly how it had been when I had arrived, and that wasn't a good thing! No one had done any levelling work at all, and absolutely nothing else I had asked for was ready either! Oh boy, building in India.. I had learned my lessons well during the build of Earthship Karuna, but I had never had to rely on others to organise things for me before. Unfortunately we would have to level this ourselves, but I saw the positive side to that, which was that everyone would also see how to level the area! It wouldn't take too long as it was a small area and was already relatively flat. I had a good sit down and just stared at the space for some time. Then I moved to another spot and did the same.. It was hard to believe that in just 2 weeks we were going to have a roofed Mini Earthship standing before me! I felt quite positive about it, even though I had spent years building Earthship Karuna. I did the math and we just needed to do 3 or 4 courses a day and we would be up to the roof within around a week. With 30 people and just 20 or so tyres per course I felt that was achievable.

9'O'Clock came slowly and all I could do was wait for people to arrive. I was a bit stressy really, but not too bad. I managed to talk with Joan and she apologised for the workers not preparing, but they simply had not turned up. They were there today, and ready to start the digging at 9am. They did indeed arrive and I set them to work digging a huge hole behind the Earthship and to get the ground levelled around the front. The hole behind the Earthship was my attempt to introduce cooling tubes into the Earthship. These tubes are normally long 12 inch diameter metal or plastic pipes that are buried behind the house as an air intake. As the air passes through the pipe 4ft underground, the air is cooled and enters that house as naturally cooled air. We never managed to get the right pipe and so I decided to try it with small 2 inch pipe that had many bends and would all be buried in the hole and covered with dirt. Here is an image to show you how it SHOULD be done:

 

It was about 9:30am and no one had arrived yet. What WAS going on!? All my carefully laid plays were not quite happening, but I just had to surrender and work with what I had. I kept busy preparing the site with the labour until finally people started rolling in at around 9:45. Apparently they had were all delayed by breakfast, and it took over an hour for the hotel to feed everyone. I believe them! Here are some of them packed into a Rickshaw!

 

I had arranged for everyone to do some yoga in the morning, led by a Russian lady that I had just met the day before. I wanted to do this, even if it meant sacrificing some precious time because I like how it feels to do it as a group, and how it changes the vibe afterwards. Since everyone arrived so late, it was quite hard to me to then start doing yoga, so I asked her to make it short so that we could start doing something before lunch time. IN the end she did something called Falun Dafa, which is more like Qi Gong than yoga, and it was very nice and easy for everyone.

Finally, by around 11am everyone had arrived, we had all eaten breakfast, and all done morning yoga! We were ready to start ;-) Job 1, bring the tyres! I explained to everyone the basics of tyre selection. We always start with the biggest tyres at the bottom and work up using the same size or smaller. So everyone went and grabbed some tyres and brought them to the site. We laid out the first course of tyres around the center area that had already been made and was raised around 1 foot from the ground level. In the image below you can see me explaining things to everyone.

 

Now came the time to finally show everyone the most important part of building an Earthship. HOW TO RAM A TYRE! The most important building block of any Earthship is the tyre. They are filled with dirt and then compacted using brute force and a sledge hammer. It takes around 30-60 minutes to ram a tyre, and it is hard work. The good thing is you can pace yourself, and when working in a group it is actually a lot of fun. The two main roles are bringing dirt to the tyre and pounding the dirt into it. Therefore we work in teams, and people who get tired can just run dirt and feed a person who is pounding. The guys usually love pounding tyres bare chested to impress the girls, and the girls are usually impressed!

This is SUCH an important point that I am going to drive it home. One of the most common things I hear about the drawbacks of using tyres is that it is such hard work. I think that is such a shame, because when done properly and with the right people, it is one of the quickest and most enjoyable parts of the build. In this build we were attempting to finish all the tyre work within 7 days, and so that is hardly that much time of hard graft. Once the tyres are done we are left with a lot of lighter work such as mud plastering. So don't be scared of hard work folks, its really the magic of the whole journey.

I had arranged lunch to be delivered by the hotel, and we all ate together on the grass under a tree in Ananda Farm. It was the best way to avoid huge delays if people left and tried to get their own lunch. I knew if we did that I would not see anyone again until 4 O'Clock. So it was perfect like this, and the food was good. It was a HOT day, and we really felt it sitting on the grass in an open area. Luckily the build was happening inside of the forest, and we were well shaded from the sun. I finished up my lunch quickly and popped to my house to check in with my Internet job in London! This is how I have funded my life and builds whilst living in India, and I had to be on call to deal with any urgent issues, and at any time. I could always juggle my work around what I was doing, and sure enough they had a job on for me! I never know exactly when a new job is coming, and my boss gave me a new website to make for the next day. It was an urgent job, as they always were, and I had around 24 hours to produce this website for their eager client. Luckily, I had been making these websites for them for years, and they were all quite similar to each other. It normally took me around 4 hours to finish one, and so I planned to do it that evening and the next morning before we started work.

Whilst all that was going on, it was time for me to start counting tyres! I didn't actually know how many we had, and looking at the piles that had all been brought over, we seemed a bit short! After counting I could tell that we had about two-thirds of the tyres we needed to complete this, and so I had to think fast! I toyed with the idea of trying to get more tyres, but I knew that would be a challenge because we were so far from the nearest city and I didn't have time to go on a big mission. So I decided to go out on a small mission to see if I could get a good amount of glass bottles. If I could get enough, we could make the last third of the wall using them to bring the final height of the wall to 8 feet.

You would think that finding trash would be easy in India, but surprisingly it is not. Glass bottles are quite a commodity in India and they return and reuse a big proportion of them. That is great of course, but not when you are trying to build a house out of them! Nevertheless, with a bit of persistence and with India being India, I managed to find a family who had just what I was looking for. They had 1000's of these small smoky glass whiskey bottles in sacs behind their house. I had a look and I liked them a lot. They were all the same size and style of bottle, and they were nice and small so that we could use them to make the walls easily. They were 1Rs each and I bought about 1,000 of them for 1,000 rupees which is around $10. I got them straight into a rickshaw and took them back to the build. I arrived with a big smile and a few people came to help me unload them.

Everyone was clearly enjoying themselves on day 2 and we had all learned a lot already. I decided to start a small bottle projects in the middle of the Earthship that could be used for a fireplace. I wanted to see how the bottles looked when embedded in mud, and also wanted to get everyones creative juices flowing. Also by the end of the day many people were happy to do something less strenuous. So we set to work and I showed everyone how to make a small round bottle and mud wall. We used 10% cement mixed with some sand, dirt and also some coconut hair. This would provide a strong and natural looking wall that would also dry quickly due to the use of cement. It is always fun doing this kind of thing, and just about everyone had a go at building a small part of this fireplace pit. You can see a little clip of the highlights of this below:

 

By the end of day 2 we had made great progress! The first two courses of tyres were in place, which is also the foundation. We had the window and door frames on site and ready to prop up in place, and our glass bottle fire pit project was very popular and looking good. People left all happy and energised, and I was so relieved that things had gotten off to a pretty good start. I left everyone with the strong message to be on time the next day, and I spoke with the hotel to plead with them to cook more quickly! They always say yes, but it always remains to be seen if yes actually happens!

DAY 3

People arrived late, again! It's hard to say why when you hear 5 different stories from as many people. Whilst it was hard to say for sure, it looked to me like people had stayed up late and had some fun. Then my phone rang, it was the hotel manager. He sounded really really upset an I could barely understand him, and so I told him I would come at lunch. Whilst it was hard to understand exactly, it sounded like they had been causing problems making too much noise. All that would have to wait.. we had an Earthship to build! We started the day again with our Falun Dafa, all except for me as I needed to check out the windows and door framing. The carpenters were on site and ready to take my instructions. They had never installed any framing onto a tyre wall before!

We got the wooden door and window frames in place, and secured them using the traditional method of jamming some sticks on either side of them. Once we got them in place I suddenly realised that things were not looking right! The frames were several inches too short, and not what was ordered or discussed. Mm mm. Oh the joys of self building. The good news is that with the Earthship approach nothing is set in cement! All we had to do was add a bit more height to the foundation by beefing up the tyres a bit more, and we were at the right height!

By the time that was all in place people starting coming from Falun Dafa and we got right into the tyre pounding rhythm. We also carried on with the glass bottle fire pit and had a very smooth day 3! Please do watch a very short highlights video:

 

Thanks for staying here till the end! Please let me know if you are enjoying this and whether there is something you would like me to focus on next time. DO you want to read more technical details, or hear more of the dramas!?

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