This is our straw house in Kentucky not quite finished yet. We are going to give you a photo tour of how we constructed this house for aprox $15,000 in 6 months working only weekends. We intend on inspiring others to start their project as starting is 90% of what is needed to finish.
This is not the house we built first, a Earthship is what we started with after a friend gave us a set of books detailing how to build our dream with little money. Little money is correct but back breaking labor is needed as well. After packing about 100 tires in 3 months with a total of 1000 needed we decided to look for other alternative methods.
We found a book Alternative housebuilding that covered many house building methods. One of which is Cordwood, this would be our next try. We did finish this structure in about 6 months requiring a couple of weeks vacation to do some of the harder work. In the end we had a very nice cabin of 640 square feet at a total cost of $14,000.
I have also experimented with Cob, Papercrete, and sawdust bag construction always coming back to strawbale as it is the easiest, quickest, and most affordable over all the rest.

Take a guided tour using the red arrow or jump to a spacific picture by selecting a photo ath the bottom of the screen.