The idea for an Earthship came to us after Stumbling upon a short movie posted on Youtube.

Note: This is obviously not our Earthship, I copied this from Earthship.net.

We already had a plan for migrating to Spain and build a house which could sustain itself. The trouble was, what to buy. The options varied between a couple of walls to a complete renovated house. All are expensive, albeit one quite a bit more so than the other.

The cheapest deal would be to buy a lot and build a house ourselfs. We don’t want utilities (power, water, sewage) on our property, these are expensive.
Still.., building a house can be an expensive business, especially when you want to be self-sufficient.

Luckily for us Michael Reynolds has spend the last 30 years or so figuring out how to build a house which is build from recycled materials, is self-sufficient, reasonably priced and it can be build by anybody.

He calls it an Earthship. His company is called “Earthship Biotecture”:

Earthship n. 1. passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials 2. thermal mass construction for temperature stabilization. 3. renewable energy & integrated water systems make the Earthship an off-grid home with little to no utility bills.
Biotecture n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.
You can read all about Earthships at their website:

We also maintain a Wiki which contains all the info we come across (relevant to us).

Trackback URI |