Building a ‘Dirt Bag’ House

The perfect location

Our home here in central Bulgaria provided the perfect setting for building a dirt bag house. One of the things that most attracted us to the property were the number of out-buildings. Almost unheard of in England but common place in Bulgarian villages – a property will comprise not only of a house, but also a number of other buildings. In our case we adopted a smoke house for meat preservation; a still house to make the local drink; and a wash house. There was also a large garage (with inspection pit), a donkey shed, chicken coop and rabbit house, and to top it all – a small barn. We were ecstatic! And all for €12,000!

Five years, five dogs, four cats, and a holiday business to run later, and we have realised, rather reluctantly, that livestock is not currently going to be a part of our plan. We travel too and from the Black Sea on a regular basis managing our property there, and animals need constant attention. The dogs ‘will travel’, the cats are tended to by one of our lovely neighbours, but a goat or cow would need milking, feeding etc. we did try our hand with chickens – but not very successfully! Do read my hilarious post on this experience – ‘runaway chickens and enthusiastic builders’.

So, instead, we are launching on a long awaited building project to turn the barn into an Airbnb dirt bag guest house. I will be including here our plans, and progress. We have been told that this will be the first building of its type in this region of Bulgaria.

January 2022

Our plans were submitted to the local planning authority in summer of last year and were accepted after some negotiations. Because such a structure is unheard-of here, there were concerns regarding stability as we are in an earthquake zone. We produced evidence regarding the fact that dirtbag houses are actually a preferred construction method in places such as the Philippines which experiences regular and often quite severe earth tremors. This is just one of many articles to validate this statement.

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/articles/filipino.htm

Though it is extremely cold here at the moment, the Sun is out and there is currently no snow, so we have begun demolition of the old barn!

In an attempt to re-purpose as much as possible from the original structure, we used these two old doors to make a traditional style high back settle for our living room.

March 2022

February was a bad month weatherwise, so things were slow. But work began again in earnest in March.

Reuse and re-purpose

When dismantling, we divided the materials into various categories. There were red bricks, which we intend to use for other building projects and possibly inside the dirt house itself; cob bricks, which will make an ideal basis for the bags themselves; stones – which we are using for decorative purposes for the path and garden of the home; and wood, which is mainly being used to fire our petchka.

April 2022

April was unseasonably cold again, so we got off to a slow start. We also had lots of rain – which is very welcome here as this is quite an arid climate in the summer months.

Using Local labour

A major purpose when planning our construction of the dirt bag house was obviously to build as sustainably and ecologically as possible. However, we also wanted to include the local community in our project and to provide some employment. Living as we do in a Roma village has really opened our eyes to the discrimination and prejudice that these people experience. Work for them is not only piecemeal and sporadic, but also very poorly paid. We intended to provide not only employment opportunity with a good rate of pay, but also to teach them some new building skills. Our hope is that, if the project is successful, we may go on to build more eco homes in the future and continue to provide some employment.

May 2022

Demolition is more or less completed now, the weather is glorious! And so we are about to embark on our actual building project. This is the first video in the series of our progress to date.

June2022

June saw us making real progress! With the help of local labour, we dug out our first trench for the main dome. The circumference of the dome is 7 m. We dug the trench to be 2 feet across and about 2 1/2 feet deep. We also had to level the ground in places.

A local garage was pleased to give us as many tires as we required! We are laying these inside of the trench and carefully filling them up with stones. Being careful to get into all the crevices.