WANTED! Volunteers
April 2011 we are starting with our project of building an ecological sustainable house in the south of Belgium.
Rammed Earth
We will build the house with rammed earth, straw bale and local wood.
We started thinking of building a sustainable house a few years ago and came across the earthships. It blew our minds and we started doing more research into it and we began thinking of where in Europe we would want to build one.
Earthship
We volunteered on the build of Earthship Normandy, we visited an earthship in Spain and I became part of the Earthship crew to build the tea house in Zwolle, Netherlands.
BUT……. we are not going to build an earthship. During our volunteering work in Normandy we met a Dutch student who was studying sustainable architecture at the time and was doing research by volunteering on the build.
We started talking and she told us she needed a project to graduate. We offered her to design our house and she agreed.
Right Choice
After a while it became clear we made the right choice.
Not only are we building the house just the way we want it. It would have been almost impossible to get a mortgage on the lot of land we were buying or get a building permit for an earthship and we really needed both. It was a battle we were not prepared to fight.
So here we are, we have bought the land, a good 4000m2 on the edge of a very small town near Bastogne, Belgium, we got the mortgage for the land and are hoping to build the house with our savings and have just applied for the building permit this week.
We decided to start the build of the house next year so we can save up more money and find the right materials during this year.
Applying
If you are interested in helping out with our project and learn more about rammed earth construction and/or straw bale construction then you can sign up for our newsletter on fourelementshouse.com or send an email to fourelementshouse [at] gmail.com.
You can also read a bit more about volunteering on our site, or, if you know anybody who might be interested, please send them a link to this page.
We will inform you on the exact time-line since it is still a year away.
Because we will be building during the spring and summer months we can offer basic accommodation in the form of a place to pitch a tent on our land and basic sanitation.
Lunch will be provided and we’ll have a BBQ every Friday evening.
We are planning on having a good time building the house, with lots of fun, good company and beautiful results.
I can say from experience it is a great way to meet like minded people, having a satisfying feeling of fulfilment at the end of the day and take away new experiences when you leave.
We can use a lot of help so please let us know if you want to spend some time in the summer of 2011 building our house
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