How to build a house with tire bales | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

We also built a tire-bale bermed-earth home.  Ours is probably a little smaller than this one, at 2350 sq. ft.  We love the life!

KVR said
you built a beautiful home @jimgagnepain , Did you folks do all the work yourself?

We did a lot of the work, but we also hired a number of contractors.  We often got guidance from the contractors, and sometimes worked along side them.  I did the General Contracting, but usually deferred to the expertise of concrete workers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc.

KVR said
good way to do it and save a ton of money, we ended up doing about 80 percent of ours, enjoyed the experience but man I was physically beat when it was done

If I had to put a number to it, I would say we did about 40%.  We hired contractors for excavation, all concrete work, solar and wind installation, carpentry (paid hourly, but I usually assisted), plumbing, electrical, insulation, roof, large glass install, and wood stove pipe installation.

I did the GC.  My wife and I did all the adobe (including paper and diamond mesh), tile work, floor acid etching, most of the large glass perimeter and mullion installation (carpenter assisted in layout), calking, poly over bales, french drain, form digging, wood stove install, and lots of other items.

We hired out the shotcrete, but that was an extremely difficult day for us ("the day from hell").  It was 100+ deg F that day, and we dealt with: 1. They kept spraying over our electrical boxes, on each pass, so we had to keep digging them out (some we never found).

       2. The shotcrete kept falling off in places, so I had to staple up mesh for the next pass.

       3. Concrete was falling to the ground, and we had to get it up, otherwise we would have had to jackhammer later.   By the end, I was chipping this out with a big prybar.

       4. Didn't like this contractor.  When they finished spraying the last of the concrete, they just stood around and watched my wife and I busting our butt.

I got dehydrated that day, and woke up throughout the night, with charlie horses.  If I had it to do over again, I would not shotcrete.  I would just mix adobe, and use that.  We ended up having to adobe over most of the shotcrete anyhow, because it wasn't a finished look or feel.