Earth Homes - Part 3 of My Fantasy Homes Series

At first when I contemplated writing this hub about my No. 3 favorite fantasy home - an underground house - I was thinking it might be too dark and cave-like for my taste.

My buddy, HmrJmr (John) says he would love to see the options for cave homes- but I feel the need for more light than he does, so I have come to find many compromises.

There are several reasons why I love these homes.

When I lived in Aspen, Colorado in the late 60’s, I worked for a ecologist/educator who was a very advanced thinker and natural builder. He was the kind of man who actualized his dreams. He planned and built a bermed, sodded, environmentally-oriented children’s center called Wildwood. I actually helped tie the re-bar that reinforced this ferro concrete structure which was built on Forest Service land right outside of Aspen. I have always thought it would be lovely to build and live in a home like this - when you drive up you see only a large, grassy mound.

I also read the T.R. Tolkien Hobbit books back then and imagined living in a hobbit hole. It would suit me perfectly! I have an aversion to the straight, sharp lines of most modern homes, designed with so many angles and corners. I love the curves and roundness of these earth homes, and I would be happy to design my own curved furnishings to complete them so there would be no sharp corners to bump into! Those charming round windows are one of the features I find I imagine for all my fantasy homes!

This fantasy home I am dreaming up now is probably the most practical and green of all. From the testimonials I found on the internet, earth home people are very happy and proud of their living spaces and most of them did at least some of the work building it themselves.

It seems strange that a solar house might be underground, but that is exactly what you can build! A home that is wholly or partially underground can have solar panels set up on it’s bermed roof, saving the land around it for gardens. Or, if you want, you can even garden on your roof and the solar panels can sit next to it. The solar panels designed these days can be flat, or very short with adjustable surfaces - they don’t have to stick up so tall that they mar the views of your land and gardens.

What you end up with would depend on whether you build up and cover it over, or dig in.

The earth-bermed style (the hobbit homes I found are like this) is essentially built above ground and then covered with earth. (see the photos and Joe Anderson family hobbit style house). If you dig in, you can put all, or a part of your house underground.

Or perhaps you already own a cave, and you can just modify it to make it your home like Jock in his beautiful Australian opal mine.  Following is a rather long video of Jock telling us about his mine and the opals they used to pull out of the ground there.  Now he lives in it!  Hard to understand his Australian english talk, but fun to watch at least a part of it.

Since I am not a builder, can barely drive a nail, I look at the photos and videos of these earth homes look kind of complicated thing to build, but the owners all say it is simple and cheaper by far than conventional houses, and you can do most of it yourself. One couple spent only $15,000 total! And the Simon Dale family in Wales spent only $5,000! ( I can’t say how long ago these were built, but still - low expenses!) And if you utilize salvaged materials, or if you can mill your own lumber from trees on your property and you can rope in your friends to help with labor, plumbing, electrical, etc. you will be way ahead.

All kinds of earth-friendly, low-energy, green engineering can be used to make your home so energy efficient you will no longer have those big heating and air conditioning bills! You can spend that money on beautiful landscaping and gardens, if you want!

They say that about six feet underground the temperature will stay around 50 - 55 degrees year round.

You could add heat-gathering surfaces by digging into a south-facing hillside and build the front of your house with windows and materials to absorb the sun’s warmth, while the north part of the house will be cool and underground. In winter, properly insulated earth homes need only small heating systems and are cozy and warm. (one home I saw had only one fireplace to heat the whole house) Skylights will also pull in light and warmth.

Researching this hub I discovered that NATURAL BUILDING means utilizing only natural materials, not man-made plastics or metals that are not earth-friendly. So the earth homes and tree houses and even the house boats I fantasize about are naturally built, using primarily earth and wood. I believe the concrete reinforced berms using re-bar and ferro (sprayed on) concrete are pretty natural, as well.

My favorites, of course, were the hobbit-style houses. At frugal zeitgeist.com they show a hobbit-style home I would move into today, if only I could. It is exactly what I dream about! I love living a rather pared down lifestyle, but you can also have the most state-of-the art appliances and kitchens and baths if you want and do it without using a lot of energy.

Here on the hub we have a forum thread we call "The Tribe" where we dream about living a kind of communal, carefree life in the woods. My idea for this series of hubs came from our ideas about building small tree houses in “our forest” with a larger communal space for meetings and communal cooking. Of course, in cyber-reality we can do anything we want and HmrJmr is a master at putting up images of tree-houses, pink Ferraris with flames, and anything I can think up! So with permission to fantasize, I am having a ball imagining my friends and I building our fantasy homes and sharing the earth with all the good things it has to offer.

If you are already dreaming about living in an earth-friendly home with a kind of fantasy style to it, I will be writing about several more different fantasy homes I have in mind, all using earth-friendly materials and do-it-yourself methods as well as lots of round windows! Maybe we can share our dreams and ideas and fun images we find!