How to build a sack house

How to build a Sack house

I have been Lying dormant over the past month or so in a Farm in Northern Ecuador, enjoying the festive period with excessive consumption of just about everything. I was staying on a farm belonging to a beautiful man from the states. Primarily a chicken farm but he also had recently build a funky homemade smoker and was doing a lot of smoked meats and some specialty cured meats. It was for this reason that we set out to build a cellar to store the dead stuff. We wanted to build something cheaply with easily obtainable resources and as naturally as possible, after about 10 minutes of brain storming we came upon the idea of an earth bag house as there was plenty of sacks that had been used to export the chicken manure and obviously it wasn’t hard to find earth. There was lots of eucalyptus growing on the property which grows nice and straight and is terrible for the soil so best thing to do was to chop it down and use it for the roof. Five minutes of research and we knew what we were doing and started the next day.

We enlisted the help of a neighbour with a tractor to excavate an area and in the process obtained a huge pile of earth for the build. For the foundations we just dug out a trench in our desired dimensions so that we have a few layers of sacks under the ground. Its an incredibly strong way of building and is used in earthquake prone areas because it is gives a building a lot of flexibility and resilience.  Drainage was not a big problem because of the sand content of the soil, it was pretty much 100% sand.

To make each sack we filled them half way with earth and then, with a very snazzy hald held sewing machine, folded over the ends and zipped them closed.

There happened to be a door frame in the shed which we put in place and laid sacks around, to hold it in place we welded a bolt to a piece of rebar, the rebar was laid along the length of the wall at 2 points, and the bolt into the door frame, with the weight of nearly a million sacks it won’t be going anywhere.

Then we just laid a crap load of sacks. In between each layer of sacks we laid down two rows of barbed wire which acts as an adhesive and holds the structure together. 

After 5 or 6 layers we realised we ought to do the floor before the walls got too high.

For the floor we levelled out the area and using rocks from excavating the land painstakingly laid them one by one and bashed them in place to give a solid base for the adobe mix. We cheated a little on the adobe and used 5 to 10% cement mixed with 90% earth (with a slightly higher clay content than just sand)  Mixing each batch in a small rusty old wheelbarrow it took a while to fill it in but we got there in the end.

Then we sacked some more until we reached about 5 foot, from hear we built up the two ends into peaks to support the roof. Above the door frame we simply placed a plank of timber to bridge the gap and laid sacks on top of that.

the final sack

 Also lying around the farm was a bunch of really beefy timber and some brittle and cracked roofing panels, most of them broken from being trodden on by cows, which we sorted through and buit this stunning looking roof.

The sacks deteriorate quickly in the sun so we backfilled most of the walls which I forgot to take a picture of and will abobe the remaining exposed sections of the sack wall once the backfilled earth has settled (adobe is mud plaster mixed with a binding element, we will use rice hulls as there is an abundance of them on the farm)

 

 All together this build cost only a couple of hundred dollars we used mostly materials that were already on site and it was incredibly simple.